At a press conference due to start any minute, the Taiwanese cellphone maker is set to show off a pair of Android phones–the Cha Cha and the Salsa–as well as its first tablet and several other Android devices.

HTC’s move follows that of INQ Mobile, which last week announced two Android models that feature heavy Facebook integration. Gemalto also announced Monday it plans to integrate Facebook into SIM cards, allowing users of low-end phones better access to the social network.

Like many others’ news here at the show, most of HTC’s had leaked out well ahead of the event.

One particularly nice touch–HTC planned ahead and ran Ethernet cables to each seat in the theater. (Unfortunately, Mobilized left the MacBook Air Ethernet adapter back in the apartment.)

Mobilized has live coverage of the event below.

9:58 am: Still waiting for the press conference–which was due to start a half hour ago–to get under way. We do have comfy seats and soothing music, but would have prefereed an extra half hour of sleep.

9:59 am: Apparently all I had to do was complain. Now it’s getting started with CEO Peter Chou taking the stage.

“2011 is going to be an amazing year,” Chou promises.

Some analysts predict smartphones will outsell feature phones, Chou says.

“Features that were once fancy, extra, are now becoming standard,” he says. “‘Nice to have’ is turning into ‘must have.’”

Hardware is important, but so are software and services like Sense and HTCSense.com. Company plans new versions of HTC Sense for phones with keyboards, larger screens, etc.

10:04 am: Some stats from Chou:

25 million smartphones sold last year, more than double the prior year, with revenue up 93 percent.

The company’s global brand awareness reached 50 percent, up from 13 percent a year and a half ago. (Of course, that means half of consumers still don’t know HTC, but a big improvement nonetheless.)

10:05 am: On to 2011: 4G networks will change everything again. HTC Thunderbolt, its first LTE smartphone, shipping this week with Verizon.

10:07 am: Company is announcing five phones today, the most it has ever announced at one time. Chou says.

“I hope you agree it has been worth the wait,” Chou says, bringing out John Wang, HTC’s chief marketing officer.

10:07 am: Talking about HTC Sense. Location-data for 83 countries. HTC spent a year and a half building the maps product. You can preload, so travel won’t cost a fortune in roaming charges.

Weather is another good example, Wang says, where the company aimed not just to provide information, but also offer an emotional experience.

“When it is sunny you almost feel the warmth on your body. When it rains, you almost want to wipe your phone dry.”

10:10 am: First demo fails as video he wants to show won’t play.

“Well, maybe later on,” Wang says, moving on to the new phones.

And another fails as whatever was supposed to happen isn’t happening.

Okay, here we go. HTC Desire S. And, we’ve got some more demo fail going on.

10:12 am: “We apologize for this,” Wang says, annoucing a few-minutes pause.

10:15 am: And we are back, with HTC Desire S, Incredible S and Wildfire S.

Desire S doesn’t have front and back. Machined out of a single block of aluminum. “It feels solid in your hand,” Wang says. Also has full HD video recording.

Wildfire S, smaller and in three colors. “It can almost disappear into your pocket. (Mobilized hates it when that happens. We’ve put two iPod Nanos through the wash.

10:20 am: HTC Incredible S. As you rotate the large Android phone, the icons on the buttons also rotate. 8-megapixel camera, integrated video chat with front-facing camera. “Incredible S combines premium design with premium experience,” Wang says.

So, essentially these are updates to the existing product line.

Next up, the Facebook phones.

10:22 am: There are 500 million Facebook users worldwide, but 200 million check it on their phones. Those users are twice as engaged. Many young people check Facebook right when they wake up with a significant number doing so from their phones before they even wake up, Wang says.

Now showing a video of HTC’s work with Facebook to build the new phones.

10:24 am: Video of Facebook CEO Marc Zuckerberg touting the device.

“A lot has been made about a Facebook phone,” Zuckerberg says, but adds that there will be more than a dozen phones this year with deep social integration. “HTC is doing that here.”

Mobilized is apologizing in advance, but I may not make it through the whole press conference.

10:26 am: The new phones–the Cha Cha (with keyboard) and Salsa (touch-only) both have a dedicated blue Facebook button at the bottom.

10:27 am: Can use button to post updates, but also if taking a picture can use that button to share social network. “When you press this button, the photo is instantly uploaded to Facebook,” Wang says. Button blinks also when reading an article on the Web. Press the Facebook button and it will share that on Facebook. Similar, when you are listening to a song, pressing the button will share that information.

If you hold button down, you check in on Facebook Places.

Both phones also support Facebook messaging and chat.

“We did not just add social networking to the phone,” Wang says.

10:30 am: Bringing up Facebook VP Chamath Palihapitiya to talk about the partnership.

“I’m just frankly very thrilled we are taking this very important step, which I think will be the first of many,” he says, saying he expects Facebook and HTC to do more things together.

10:32 am: Chou back up, saying he could just stop with five great phones and ensure another great year. But he’s not. There’s a tablet coming.

10:34 am: Chou says the company could have rushed out another “me too” experience, but says that wasn’t what the company wanted to do.

Showing video of how the company came up with its tablet, the HTC Flyer.

10:37 am: Chou holds up the Flyer, then hands things back to Wang. Flyer also has unibody design, which he says makes the tablet feel solid but keeps it lightweight.

HTC wanted it to be comfortable to hold in hand. At 415 grams it is about the same weight as a paperback book.

Here are a few features: 1.5GHz chip, 6-hour battery life, dual cameras, Flash 10 and HTML 5 support, along with new 3-D-based HTC Sense experience.

10:40 am: Also has a stylus–unique among Android tablets–HTC Scribe technology.

Allows you to share things more easily, Wang says. Just scribble “let’s go” on a restaurant Web page and press a button and it is sent.

You can also use it to do audio note taking–a la Livescribe, where notes are synchronized to the audio.

Mobilized has to jam to our next meeting, but I think we have hit the high points.

Bubble Motion, which is funded by Sequoia Capital and others, is now launching Bubbly in the Philippines, after releases in India, Indonesia and Japan (chosen because of their deep mobile phone penetration). Its launch partner in the Philippines is Globe Telecom.

By the midway point of this year, Bubbly will be rolled out to all major carriers in those four countries, for a total potential audience of 800 million.

Bubbly allows users to send each other voice-based status updates. People who follow a user receive an SMS each time a new status message is posted, and pay to listen to the status message with a fee added to their regular phone bill. This can be used both for communicating with friends and family and for subscribing to updates from celebrities.

Users pay either a monthly subscription fee for celebrities in India and Indonesia, or per message in the Philippines and Japan, following the carrier billing styles in each country. The average user gets one to two messages per day.

Celebrities on Bubbly often have two to three times as many followers as they have on Twitter, bragged Bubble Motion CEO Tom Clayton on a phone interview on Wednesday. And that’s despite the fact that Bubbly costs money and Twitter is free.

Part of the reason is Bubbly has more reach than Twitter in the four countries it has launched in, Clayton said, given it is a mobile service and Twitter is often accessed over the Internet.

But grooming a stable of stars might not be defensible in the long term, given Twitter is ramping up its mobile efforts and celebrities may want to have a broader reach than they can achieve with local phone carriers and voice updates. Clayton said another edge his company has is the infrastructure it has built to deliver voice files–250 million of them since Bubbly was first launched–without overloading carrier networks.

Clayton said Bubble Motion, which has raised about $30 million in funding, is not profitable yet but is growing revenue with a direct correlation to its traffic, which is to say, doubling every quarter.

It’s connected to Amazon’s existing cloud services, so sending mail from applications already hosted on services like EC2 should be easy. Messages will cost 10 cents per thousand, and customers can send up to 2,000 per day for free when the messages originate from within an application already running on EC2 or Elastic Beanstalk, Amazon’s new service for Java developers.

Amazon named two customers already using the service: Eyejot, a video-messaging service, is using it for sending transactional messages. Another is Neustar, a managed service provider that handles domain-name queries, which is using it to ensure smooth delivery of mail related to signup for services.

All the security attention paid in recent years to securing the Windows desktop and the applications running on it have paid off a little, Cisco found, making it harder for computer scammers to successfully carry off their intended crimes on that platform. The trouble is they’re now starting to focus more attention on mobile devices, including Apple’s iPhone and iPad, and devices running Google’s Android operating system, Cisco said.

Meanwhile, the overall global volume of spam, which often contains troublemaking links that are used to deliver attacks, decreased for the first time ever in 2010. Even so, spam still increased in some developed countries where broadband connections are multiplying. In the United Kingdom, spam volume nearly doubled, while the volume in France went up 115 percent. The U.S. saw a slight decline–11.1 trillion messages down from 11.3 trillion in 2009. Spam in Brazil, China and Turkey also declined. Some of the decline can be attributed to last year’s arrest by FBI agents in Milwaukee of a Russian accused of being the “king of spam,” and to the shutdown of a few botnets used by scammers to send spam.

One thing about Cisco’s report that’s likely to draw some attention is its finding that the raw number of vulnerabilities on Apple products appear to be growing. Apple users are usually pretty sensitive about this topic, and any comparison of the Mac to Windows on the security front tends to make them grind their teeth and pound out annoyed comments on tech blogs. I know because I’ve done the same teeth-grinding and have in the past criticized other reports for similar findings.

Here Cisco is addressing vulnerabilities that Apple has itself documented and patched in software updates. One thing that’s not clear to me–though it sure looks like it–is whether Cisco is combining vulnerabilities found on both iOS (iPhone and iPad) and OS X (the Mac). The data it’s using is from its IntelliShield service, which tracks vulnerabilities and security incidents, and shows that over five years Apple’s vulnerabilities rose, from less than 200 in 2006 to more than 350 in 2010. That rate was higher than Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard and Cisco itself, the report found, though it goes on to say that Apple has worked harder than most other vendors to protect its users. Security is one of the reasons Apple imposes such strict rules on what’s available in the App store, though people still jailbreak their phones.

Another trend Cisco found is something called “money muling.” Tom Gillis, VP and general manager of Cisco’s Security business unit, describes money muling as using unsuspecting people who are attracted by “work at home” spam messages and Web ads to participate in money laundering by moving small amounts of money into bank accounts, just a few thousand dollars at a time. He says the operations around this are becoming increasingly elaborate, and criminals will devote a lot of effort to developing it this year.

I talked with Gillis about the report and other security trends that Cisco found. Here are a few highlights from our conversation:

NewEnterprise: So you’re seeing fewer attacks on Windows and more on mobile devices. Is that simply because there are more of them?

Tom Gillis: It’s the simple fact that there’s this new class of mobile device coming into the enterprise that used to be a phone and now it’s a computer, and it can access enterprise information. So what we’re seeing is that the raw number, but not the severity, is down on Windows. Part of this is that Windows 7 was a very good release on Microsoft’s part from a security standpoint. And we’ve got these new devices coming into the enterprise, and so we’re seeing a shift in focus of attacks on these mobile devices. They’re vulnerable to attack and they’re relevant in the enterprise. Two years ago this would have been too small a population to be meaningful.

What kind of attacks are you seeing?

It varies. In some cases there’s a little “phone home” code in a free gaming app. Pretty gentle stuff so far. But as people start using smartphones to access sensitive information we need to start thinking about security considerations on these devices. There’s a larger theme here that the whole nature of attacks is changing dramatically. The fact that spam volumes dropped at all is a big tell. For 10 years this has only gone up. We’re not forecasting a steady decline in spam, but the fact that it slowed down at all is an indicator of the shift in the way that attackers are using email. The attacks are more targeted and personal, for one thing.

Can’t some of this decrease be attributed to some of the arrests that happened last year?

It can. There’s been a handful of arrests. And they went after not only the botnet operators but other parts of the spam value chain. There are firms and entities that build botnets of compromised machines that relay the spam, and then there are other firms and entities that rent time on those botnets that do the merchandising. The biggest category is selling fake pharmaceuticals. Some of these fake pharma operations were shut down and the people associated with them arrested. It’s not an easy thing to do, because they’re global, they move around, and so to make an arrest in this space is a huge accomplishment.

So what is the thinking now about securing the mobile device?

We think there are two ways to make mobile devices work in the enterprise. The flood of devices into the enterprise is huge, and everyone wants to use them to check their email and access corporate directories and other fundamental things. There needs to be some kind of software on the end point–the phone or device. It will have to be light. You can’t have some kind of antivirus suite running on the phone. It would be a little piece of software that’s on all the time that knows when you’re behind the corporate firewall and when you’re not, and manages your connection accordingly. We bought a company called ScanSafe that has 40 data centers around the world. When you’re outside the firewall it connects to you the nearest data center and enforces your corporate policies, but all you as the user know is that it just works. This notion of being on or off the corporate network goes away. And we can do all kinds of scanning for security, independent of the device that’s being used.

This year we also saw the Stuxnet attacks, which we now know for certain were carried out against the Iranian nuclear program. Clearly this is a new kind of attack that can be mounted against industrial control systems via computer networks. Is Cisco researching this?

Massively. Often these types of attacks are targeted against Cisco’s biggest enterprise customers. Who buys Cisco’s infrastructure? The biggest banks in the world, the defense contractors. If the goal of an attacker is to disrupt an economy, their targets will be our customers, and they’re demanding a response from us. I like to call it global threat correlation, but it comes down to taking huge samples of network traffic and picking out good traffic from the bad. Cisco has a good advantage here because our equipment is so widely deployed around the world. As we start measuring traffic we can develop reputation data on every publicly routable IP address on the Internet. As we start putting telemetry info into that equipment–and the customer can choose to enable it or not, and it’s turned off by default. But people turn it on because it helps them against the unknown kind of attacks that are popping up. If a Web server says its a Web server, but you just saw it sending spam three minutes ago, there’s a pretty good chance it’s part of a botnet. Once you know that you know that, you can start to mount a pretty good defense. We’re putting a lot of energy into developing that, and it’s proven to be pretty robust.

Today’s the day we all find out. The two are showing the first fruits of their combined quarter billion dollars worth of labor. The pair announced they have built four enterprise-focused appliances that they say will combine applications, infrastructure and productivity tools into a single unified system. The first half of this quartet is being announced today, with more to follow.

One is the HP Business Decision Appliance, which is intended to run business intelligence applications. The appliance, they say, greatly reduces the time and effort for companies to deploy and manage business intelligence, which is a fancy way of saying you’re analyzing the data from the operation of your business, and looking for patterns or trends that might not otherwise be apparent. It’s optimized to run for Microsoft’s SQL server database software and its SharePoint collboration software, and takes less than an hour to install, they promise.

The second is the HP Business Data Warehouse Appliance, a data store designed for small- and mid-size companies that they say delivers performance that’s suitable for a big enterprise, but doesn’t require an administrator to run it. It’s a smaller version of the HP Enterprise Data Warehouse Appliance, which the two first previewed in November and is available now.

Next up is a messaging appliance geared toward making it easy to install Microsoft Exchange 2010, the server piece of Outlook, Microsoft’s all-purpose email, calendar and contact software that’s so widely used in companies around the world. Its formal name is the HP E5000 Messaging System for Microsoft Exchange Server 2010, and the two companies say it’s the industry’s first self-contained server for enterprise-class messaging that can be deployed in only a few hours. It comes pre-configured and with “best practices” designed in. The mailboxes are large, centrally archived and available to any device. It will be available in March.

What’s after that? HP and Microsoft are also working on something they call the HP Database Consolidation Appliance, which can bring hundreds of databases into a single appliance. This one will run SQL server and Microsoft’s Hyper-V Cloud.

It’s all about making IT projects easy to deploy, says Mark Potter, HP’s senior vice president and general manager for industry standard servers and software. “It can take anywhere from one to 18 months to roll out a sophisticated service to end users,” Potter told me in an interview yesterday. “About 32 percent of all IT projects are rated a success. It takes our customers a lot of time, planning and risk. We’re trying to bring a solution to the market that does for business applications what Microsoft Office did for desktop productivity.”

Why spend so much to team up? Microsoft and HP think that by 2015 there’s a combined market worth $55 billion for business intelligence, data warehousing, messaging and online transactions, making that quarter billion potentially worth it. Now they just have to prove these appliances can sell.