New Palm smartphones will arrive early next year, HP has revealed.

"You will see us coming early next year with new phones," Senior HP Eric Cador said in Barcelona today.

Cador didn't provide any other details - he was talking more about HP's $1.2bn acquisition of Palm than the new subsidiary's products.

But he did stress that the motivation for the purchase was for HP to get its hands on Palm's WebOS.

HP has already said next year will see the introduction of one or more tablets based on the operating system.

Cador's statement comes hot on the heels of speculation that a new Palm smartphone, codenamed 'Mansion', is in the works and it will drop the company's trademark physical micro-keyboard, relying entirely on the touchscreen and an Android/iOS-like virtual keyboard. ®

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