Palm hires ex-Apple engineer

March 09, 2007

From The New York Times:

SAN FRANCISCO, March 8 — Palm Inc., the maker of hand-held computers, has hired a top Silicon Valley software designer as it seeks to respond to the challenge posed by Apple’s new iPhone. The designer, Paul Mercer, a former Apple computer engineer, began work three weeks ago at Palm on a line of new products, a company spokeswoman said, but she declined to comment further on the project.

I’d love to see Palm make a comeback in the PDA and smartphone industry. I’ve bought mostly Compaq / HP’s Windows Mobile PDAs in the past, but I still can’t help but admire some of Palm’s hardware designs. Hopefully they’ll start showing some innovation in their software as well.

Marc Charbonneau is a mobile software engineer in Portland, OR. Want to reply to this article? Get in touch on Twitter @mbcharbonneau.