According to Yam Su Yin, HP’s senior director of consumer PCs and media tablets for Asia-Pacific, the tech juggernaut is once again eyeing a share in the heavily crowded smartphone market. The executive told The Indian Express that the company is looking to double down on all segments of the mobile market, including tablets, notebooks and all-in-ones.

When asked if HP has a smartphone in the works, Su Yin replied that “the answer is yes but I cannot give a timetable. It would be silly if we say no. HP has to be in the game.” He added that “being late you have to create a different set of proposition[s]. There are still things that can be done. It’s not late. When HP has a smartphone, it will give a differentiated experience.”

Chances are that this “differentiated experience” will be based on an array of consumer services similar to Apple’s. It’s also likely that the device will feature an operating system other than Android, such as Windows Phone 8 or even Mozilla’s Firefox OS. The latter doesn’t have much in the way of market share, but it is supported by a number of major carriers in the U.S. and Europe.

By the looks of it, HP only took two short years to internalize the blunder that was the Palm acquisition. The $1.2 billion cash deal snowballed into a company-wide push to make webOS the operating system of the future under former CEO Leo Apotheker, and promptly fell flat on its face after the Palm Pre failed to live up to consumer expectations. HP halted production of webOS devices a few months later, Apotheker resigned, and the operating system relaunched under an open-source license. It remains to be seen if Meg Whitman can succeed where her predecessor couldn’t.