The latest move from Palm indicates that the company is working heavily to respond to the “iPhone challenge”. The maker of the Treo smartphones hired Paul Mercer, a former Apple computer engineer, to help them out with the new line of products.
Mercer, 39, began working for the Palm three weeks ago, along with two employees from Iventor, the independent design firm that he headed in Palo Alto, California. His recent successes include a job for Samsung, where he worked under contract to design the Z5, the best-selling MP3 player in South Korea.
If Palm is smart enough, its next products would dump the Palm OS (Garnet) and would be based either on Windows Mobile or Access Linux Platform (ALP), which has the Garnet Virtual Machine built-in.
Who knows, maybe Mercer will be working on the rumored WiMAX-enabled ultra-thin smartphone… (via: New York Times)