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"I think you'll see us with a family of slate products, clearly a Microsoft product in the enterprise and a WebOS product broadly-deployed," said Todd Bradley, executive vice president of HP's personal systems group. "Slates are going to be an enormous category; this is just in its infancy."

Earlier last week, Microsoft's chief executive Steve Ballmer confirmed that it had teamed up with nearly two dozen hardware makers to release Windows-based tablets to challenge Apple's iPad.

HP also said it plans to build tablets using Palm's WebOS software. The company will port the mobile operating system to a host of other upcoming products, including smartphones, netbooks and printers.

"If you really want to deliver a great experience, in this case, the HP experience, you want your own OS," said Jon Rubinstein, Palm's chief executive. "I think it's important to have control over the entire user experience and really deliver great consumer products."

HP said WebOS 2.0 is on track for release later this year and features continual software update through cloud-based services. It recently completed its $1.2 billion acquisition of Palm.