Undeterred by its botched attempt to monetize WebOS, HP is once again moving in on the increasingly lucrative mobile space. Yam Su Yin, the vendor’s senior director of consumer devices for Asia-Pacific, confirmed his company’s intentions in an interview last month.

HP chief exec Meg Whitman dragged this topic back into the limelight during a Tuesday chat with WSJ’s Alan Murray. She said that the smartphone market in particular is central to Hewlett-Packard’s long terms ambitions in the consumer space.

“We ultimately in my view have got to be in the smartphone business because it’s just a continuing of compute. Whether it’s the workstation, the desktop, the laptop, a hybrid, or tablets or smartphones, it is a continuum of personal compute,” Whitman told Murray. “We’ve never called our [consumer device] business the PC business, we call it the Personal Systems Group, and that to me sets the business definition correctly – that we are in the personal systems business.”

How does HP plan to take its place alongside Apple and Google? Whitman said that the company is broadening its mobility lineup with a “whole set of very interesting mobile devices.” She mentioned the ElitePad 900, which is touted as the industry’s first enterprise tablet, and the Envy x2 laptop/tablet hybrid.

Hewlett-Packard has the resources to level the playing field from a hardware standpoint, but it remains to be seen if it can differentiate on the software side. The vendor will have a hard time topping the consumer services already available with competing devices. For this reason and others, HP may opt to distance itself from the oversaturated Android market and put its weight behind an emerging platform such as Windows Phone 8 or Mozilla OS. This approach may beat the alternatives – although it failed to get WebOS off the ground in 2011.

Click on the video below to see the interview clip with Meg Whitman.