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For the past couple of years, Palm founder Jeff Hawkins has often spoken of the company's plans to introduce a third category of device that's neither PDA or smartphone. Lately, there's been speculation that D-Day for what's recently been referred to as the 'Hawk' will be tomorrow, when Hawkins is expected to introduce this mystery device at Walt Mossberg’s D: All Things Digital conference.

Well, we just received a note from Palm that confirms these rumors. Targeted at journalists and analysts, the note - really an invitation to take part in a webcast - says:

Jeff Hawkins, founder of Palm, Inc., will host a live video webcast on Wed., May 30, to describe a new category of mobile device. The webcast will follow the announcement of this new product at the D: All Things Digital conference in Carlsbad, Calif.

While there's been plenty of speculation as to what the 'Hawk' is, not much is known about the device. Palm has been able to keep nearly all details about the gadget extremely close to the vest.

What little we do know about 'Hawk' comes directly from Hawkins:

Speaking with Business 2.0 a while back, Hawkins implied the new device could be revolutionary like a couple of Palm’s past products: "One of the missions we have at Palm is to design breakout products. It's hard, really hard, to do. Palm's done it twice, you could argue, with the original Palm Pilot, and the Treo smartphone. We've got another one in development."

Back in July 2005, Hawkins said the following during an interview with the Portland Business Journal:

What are the implications of a world where everyone has a super high-speed Internet connection in their pocket and many gigabytes of storage, super-fast processors, audio, visual and multimedia? What are the consequences of that? How will that change computing when you have all that stuff available to you all the time? I try to think into the future. That's how we come up with new products. So I'm not going to tell you what it is, but it's following the consequences of mobile computing.

So is 'Hawk' a kind of ultra mobile personal computer, a tablet in the mode of Nokia's N800 series, or something else altogether? Will it be as revolutionary as Hawkins asserts? Who knows.

We'll soon find out.