Hewlett Packard is rumored to be planning a return to the smartphone business in the coming days with a pair of low-priced devices aimed at China and other Asian markets.

The two rumored phablet-sized smartphones would be priced between $200 and $250 as off-contract, unlocked devices and could appear before the end of 2013, according to The Information(Opens in a new window).

The tech site reported this week that HP CEO Meg Whitman is “taking another stab at the crowded mobile-phone industry as she tries to turn around the company.” The rumored “affordable” smartphones for markets like China, India, and the Philippines are purportedly a 6-inch device and a 7-inch handset that would push the envelope on the line between phablets and full-blown tablets.

Details on these devices are pretty spare, but the assumption is that they would run Google’s Android operating system and sport an ARM-based application processor. HP already has the Android-based Slate 7 ($129.00 at Amazon)(Opens in a new window) tablet powered by a dual-core 1.6GHz Rockchip Cortex-A9 chip in its portfolio.

It could get interesting if the company goes in a different direction—HP plays in the mobile device market with products like its Envy X2 , which runs Microsoft’s Windows 8 and has an Intel Atom chip under the hood. It seems unlikely that the company would test the waters with its first stab at a smartphone in several years with devices running Windows Phone 8 and/or featuring Intel inside, but you never know.

HP abandoned its last, nascent effort to develop smartphones using the webOS mobile operating system a couple of years ago. In 2011, the computing giant killed its consumer tablet, the Touchpad, and ended support for webOS devices, effectively taking a mulligan on its 2010 acquisition of webOS developer and handset maker Palm.