LAS VEGAS -- Is Microsoft planning a new Tablet PC push just as Apple makes the market interesting again? That's the word tonight from the New York Times, which quotes anonymous sources saying that CEO Steve Ballmer will unveil "a novel take on a slate-type computer," made by HP, at his CES keynote Wednesday.

The post on the New York Times' Bits blog refers at one point to Microsoft's not-so-secret Courier project but doesn't explicitly say this is it. The Times says the slate to be shown by Ballmer at CES "will be touted as a multi-media whiz with e-reader and multi-touch functions." The device hasn't been named, the post says, and Ballmer is expected to show it in a video during his keynote.

In the early part of the last decade, Microsoft made a push into Tablet PCs, a favorite project of Bill Gates, but the machines running the company's specialized tablet operating system were never able to break out of their niche status. Apple is widely expected to unveil its own tablet-style computer later this month, and speculation about its plans has sparked some renewed interest in the concept across the industry.

Microsoft isn't commenting tonight on the report or the contents of Ballmer's keynote.