By | February 24 2013 7:32 PM

The Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE:HPQ) will re-enter the consumer tablet market this spring with its $169 HP Slate 7, the company announced Sunday.Hewlett-Packard exited the market in 2011, when its TouchPad came and went within seven weeks.One major difference between the new HP Slate 7 and the old TouchPad centers on the mobile operating system employed by the company: The former will run Android Jelly Bean, a product of Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG), while the latter ran webOS, a product of HP (as a result of its 2010 acquisition of Palm Inc.).In December, the information-technology market reseacher International Data Corp., or IDC, boosted its 2013 forecast for the worldwide tablet market to 172.4 million units from 165.9 million units and hiked its 2016 forecast for the same market to 282.7 million units from 261.4 million units.At the same time, IDC revised its forecasts with respect to the future market shares of the three major tablet operating systems. It anticipated the share held by Apple Inc.'s (NASDAQ:AAPL) iOS would fall to 49.7 percent in 2016 from 53.8 percent in 2012; the share held by Google's Android would fall to 39.7 percent from 42.7 percent during the same period; and the share held by the Microsoft Corp.'s (NASDAQ:MSFT) Windows would rise to 10.3 percent from 2.9 percent over the same time.