HP has just announced that it will acquire smart phone maker Palm for $1.2 billion. Palm has been troubled for some time--while the Palm Pre was an interesting smart phone with innovative software, sales remained disappointing.

HP named the Palm Pre's webOS software as a major part of its motivation for the acquisition. It's good to see webOS get a second chance. Aside from enabling HP to enter the smart phone market, it'll be interesting to see if HP finds ways to incorporate the operating system into other devices. HP has been exploring directions such as Web-connected printers, which seem like natural beneficiaries of Palm's intellectual property.

Though malware is not yet common on mobile phones, experts are taking a hard look at how it could appear down the road, hoping to find solutions before real attacks emerge.

Researchers from Rutgers University recently identified a series of possible attacks on smart phones, including one that would grant the attacker the ability to eavesdrop on a user. They will present these proof-of-concept attacks tomorrow at HotMobile 2010, a conference taking place in Annapolis, MD.

The researchers didn't exploit any vulnerabilities to get it onto the phone--instead, they pre-installed a rootkit. This is a piece of software that buries itself deep in a device's operating system, where it can take control of most of the software running on the machine. Though there are some legitimate uses for rootkits, for the most part they're a particularly nasty type of malware.

The researchers demonstrate their system on the NeoFreeRunner phone, running the open-source software stack OpenMoko. Their attacks used malicious text messages to give instructions to the rootkit. Because the rootkit is able to control so much of the phone's software, it could hide the text messages from the legitimate user and carry out instructions without interference.

In one attack, the researchers instructed the phone to call a specified number, which might allow them to use the smart phone to listen in on a confidential meeting attended by the legitimate user. They were also able to instruct the phone to report its location to the attacker, and to drain its battery by turning on energy-hogging features without the user's knowledge.

The Rutgers researchers believe that smart phones will soon need to have tools for detecting rootkits and other malicious software. This could be a challenge, they say, because the algorithms used to search for such software use a lot of processing power and would reduce battery life. So they propose offloading that processing to the service provider, following the model of cloud-based antivirus that has been gaining traction on desktop computers.

AT&T announced today that its first Android device, the Motorola Backflip, will be available on its network starting March 7. In January, AT&T announced big Android plans, promising five devices within the first half of this year.

The phone includes Motorola's Motoblur interface, which integrates closely with a user's social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace. It also offers an interesting new feature called Backtrack, which uses an additional touch panel, accessible when the device is folded open, to allow users to scroll through websites without blocking the screen with their fingertips.

Motorola's recent innovations to smart phone interfaces have been impressive, though my own use of Motoblur suggests that bugginess sometimes interrupts the overall good user experience. For example, the connection to my social networks periodically breaks, requiring me to reboot to fix the problem. Motorola is investing heavily in the interface, however--it even ran an ad for Motoblur during the Super Bowl.

It's unclear how the Backflip will fare going head-to-head with the iPhone, but Motorola is probably glad to get another opportunity at making a big entry into the market. The momentum the company built with other recent Android phones, the Droid (Verizon) and the Cliq (T-Mobile), was damaged by Google's introduction of the Nexus One.

With a two-year contract, the Backflip will cost $199.99, though AT&T is also offering a $100 rebate to sweeten the deal. With the rebate, this makes the Backflip's price comparable to that of the iPhone 3G.

The video below shows several of the phone's features, including Backtrack, in action.