Months of preparation for Hewlett-Packard's tablet foray end on Friday as the company officially unleashed the TouchPad, with up to a hundred Best Buy outlets initially offering the device that retails at starting price of $499.

According to the Wall Street Journal, HP has deployed well-trained sales staff on Best Buy stores to actively push the device out of the shelf, with the company declaring that such aggressive marketing tactic will be sustained through the last month of 2011.

The ploy, experts said, is HP's way of catching up with the rest of the pack in the reinvigorated tablet computer market effectively re-launched by Apple when the giant tech firm successfully issued its iPad that has so far chalked up unit sales of 25 million.

That numbers, the WSJ said, translated into additional $100 billion market capitalization for Apple, giving the company another muscle in dominating another segment of the industry as PC sales slowly dwindles.

For HP, the slow down in the movements of desktop and notebook sales meant a loss of up to $50 billion and achieving a hit on the new TouchPad is the company's best bet in taking the road back to recovery.

HP's Richard Kerris told the publication that they are well aware of the tough competition with its competitors getting some headway as he acknowledged that "we know we're the fifth man in a four-man race," alluding to the earlier tablet products launched by RIM, Samsung, Motorola and of course the current leader, Apple.

In a 'world' now dominated by Google's Android and Apple's iOS, HP has opted to sell it tablet device powered by its webOS that the company acquired when it purchased Palm in 2010 for $1.2 billion.

HP bigwigs have been adamant that having sole control of the device they market would be far better but the numbers are stack against the firm as it admitted that by its actual retail launch, TouchPad offers only measly available apps of up to 300.

For Apple, developers have already released some 90,000 applications that only shored up iPad's reputation as the most viable tablet around, with Android-powered handhelds not that far behind.

Such spectre is hardly attractive for software developers, who likely will have to wait out if the HP device will prove to be significant hit before they invest efforts and money in designing and deploying apps for TouchPad.

Still, HP senior vice president Stephen DeWitt is optimistic that once success visits the new gadget, program developers will take the cue and start working on apps that will make the HP tablet more marketable.

Meantime, HP stares at the glaring reality that PC sales have been retreating while tablets are bringing more and more revenues to its competitors, with analysts projecting that tablet sales could breach the 70 million this year, a number that HP hopes will get at least a slice in order to manage some turnaround.