14 DAY TRIAL // Even though Palm was previously known for not pushing its devices on schedule, it seems that the new HP CEO Leo Apotheker has managed to make some changes in this respect.
The company's first tablet running on the WebOS 3.0 mobile platform was previously slated for a June 2011 release.
However, it seems that the slate will be available on the market much earlier than expected and rumors point to an April release.
According to the guys over at DigiTimes, who are citing sources from HP's upstream component partners, the manufacturer is preparing to begin selling its TouchPad tablet in April, with shipments starting by the end of March.
The same sources are saying that HP plans to ship around 4-5 million TouchPad tablet units and a total of 45-48 million notebooks and tablet PCs in 2011.
At first glance, the number of TouchPad tablets that the company is aiming to sell might seem very high, but it's only 10% from Apple's expectations.
No details about the price tag have been leaked, so we're still left with the old $600 price that was tipped off a couple of weeks ago.
HP TouchPad is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon dual-CPU APQ8060 1.2 GHz processor and runs the WebOS mobile platform.
The manufacturer adopted an iPad-like 4:3 aspect ratio for its display, unlike standard Android tablets which feature a 16:10 panel. The tablet's 9.7-inch display has a native resolution of 1,024 x 768 pixels, plus 18-bit color and XGA capacitive multitouch support.
There's no information about the regions where the first TouchPads will arrive, but speculations point to a possible initial launch in the US with the rest of the world following at a later time.
HP is also expected to coordinate the launch of its newly announced WebOS smartphones with the TouchPad.