HP has confirmed that, despite its recent acquisition of smartphone-centric company Palm, it has no intentions to go into the smartphone market, saying that the decision to do so simply wouldn’t make sense.

The confirmation will be sad news for long-time Palm fans...

Word comes via Engadget that HP’s CEO, Mark Hurd, outlined the company’s strategy fairly clearly to investors at a recent conference. According to Hurd, HP has no designs on the smartphone market, and is of the opinion that it would be a little unwise to “spend billions of dollars trying to go into the smartphhone business; that doesn’t in any way make any sense.” That much alone should be a comfort to those who had feared that the OEM might well find itself in some trouble if it attempted to compete with a line of entrenched devices from both Apple and RIM, to say nothing of the morass of Android devices out there.

As many had predicted before now, HP seems to be very happy to have obtained Palm’s mobile operating system, the much vaunted Web OS, as part of the acquisition, and is hoping to use it to usurp the tablet market. Whether or not that much will work is something we’ll be curious to see, but the word from Hurd is interesting,

“We didn’t buy Palm to be in the smartphone business. And I tell people that, but it doesn’t seem to resonate well. We bought it for the IP. The Web OS is one of the two ground-up pieces of software that is built as a web operating environment… We have tens of millions of HP small form factor web-connected devices… Now imagine that being a web-connected environment where now you can get a common look and feel and a common set of services laid against that environment.”

Of course, less trusting individuals (by which I mean, JJ) aren’t so sure about HP’s statements to the effect that it won’t be entering the smartphone business, saying instead that it “seems like a Murder She Wrote throw-them-off-the-scent” move.

Watch HP for any upcoming murder-mystery so.