HP sets price for its debut TouchPad tablet PC with WebOS

The Wifi version of HP's Touchpad tablet PC will go on sale from mid-July, with prices starting at £399.

UK buyers can pre-order the HP Touchpad from 19 June. The version with 32GB of storage space will cost £479, with the 16GB version priced at £399.

The Touchpad is HP's first tablet PC and runs a propretary operating system called WebOS, which is based on Linux. The screen size, at 9.7in, is the same as Apple's iPad.

Like the most recent version of Apple's iOS, WebOS promises users the ability to run several applications at once and switch between them.

HP said the Touchpad will have an intelligent search tool called JustType, so the device could make guesses about the type of activity the user wants to engage in as soon as they start typing on the onscreen keyboard, in a way similar to that of the Start menu in Windows 7 and Vista.

Support for both Flash and the emerging web standard HTML5 is included, menaing that HP Touchpad users will be able to view a wider range of web content than iPad owners.

Tablet PCs that rival Apple's iPad 2 are slowly beginning to emerge. A rash of cheap tablets running Android and Windows 7 have generally failed to impress, with the exception of the Motorola Xoom.

Pricing of the HP Touchpad matches the iPad 2, but is £80 more expensive than the Motorola Xoom for the 32GB version.