Ending weeks of speculation about its future, Palm has been acquired by Hewlett-Packard for $1.2 billion, the companies announced this afternoon.

The survival of webOS and its parent company had come under question in recent weeks, with some analysts suggesting that shares of Palm were essentially worthless. Things only got worse when RadioShack decided to stop selling Palm's two flagship devices: Pre and Pixi.

Now it appears that Palm and its mobile operating system have lived to fight another day, with CEO Jon Rubinstein saying in a statement that "HP’s longstanding culture of innovation, scale and global operating resources make it the perfect partner to rapidly accelerate the growth of webOS."

The move puts HP squarely back in the smartphone game (they currently sell the Windows Mobile-powered iPAQ) — a space pioneered in many ways by Palm during the 1990s but since taken over by the likes of Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Research in Motion. Even HP's biggest rival in the PC space — Dell — is gearing up to launch an Android-powered smartphone later this year.

With only 6% or so of the smartphone market at last count, the company still faces an enormously uphill battle in trying to once again become a major player in mobile. Nonetheless, Palm users and developers can breathe a collective sigh of relief as the threat of a sudden death to the smartphone maker has been taken off the table.