07/03/2008, 8:55pm, EDT
Thursday, July 3rdPast Helio/Sidekick designer reworking Palm
One of the most prominent phone interface designers is now working for Palm for its next operating system, Engadget confirms in a hunt for new information. Matias Duarte, who designed much of the interface behind the Danger Sidekick and later moved on to Helio's custom interface, is now known through checks with sources and Palm itself to be a Senior Director in Palm's Human Interface and User Experience design group. The new executive quietly left his former post at Helio for the new position nearly two years ago in September 2007.
Little information is available about Duarte's current projects, though the designer has publicly acknowledged work on "something new" through an online posting and is in a role that would likely charge him with at least some of the interface design work behind the new Linux-based PalmOS. The sequel, nicknamed Nova, willl represent the first major refresh of PalmOS since version 5.0 was shown in 2002 and is known to have a much more Internet-centric design that also has an interface targeted at an entirely different class of user than either today's simpler PalmOS (used on the Centro) or the complex Windows Mobile (used for most Treos).
Nova is scheduled to launch in early 2009 but has been delayed multiple times, showing on Palm's roadmap as early as 2004.
The confirmed hiring reveals a more concerted effort by Palm to hire high-profile mobile device creators and restore some of its lost influence in the smartphone market. In 2007, the company hired former iPod co-creator Jon Rubinstein as an executive chairman and promptly saw major reorganization at the company that included both pushing out underperforming executives as well as offering incentives to potential new talents to revitalize Palm's design. It's unknown as to whether Rubinstein's influence contributed to Duarte's hiring at Palm.
Filed under: iPod, industry
Other story tags: Linux, Windows Mobile, Palm, Treo, Centro, Helio, Sidekick, Danger, PalmOS
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Julian/Cesarian Calendar?
"The new executive quietly left his former post at Helio for the new position nearly two years ago in September 2007."
Um... Are you using the Julian Calendar or the Cesarian Calendar? Are you doing the calendar reset introduced in 1904? Cuz my math calculates less than a year ago.... Oh well...
lame article
whomever wrote this article finally found out that Duarte was hired by Palm TWO YEARS AGO. So it'll be three years since he was hired before Palm can come out with something based on his assistance. Something tells me Palm is not operating on Internet time. Or any time after 1950.
Palm was dead the moment they shipped a device based on Windows Mobile instead of PalmOS. It'll have been 7 years since even the last minor revision to PalmOS. Every other cell phone OS maker has come out with multiple revisions in the time, including Microsoft.
In that time, a brand new entry to the cell phone business entered the market and single-handedly kicked the entire industry upside the head, and probably caused Palm to halt what it was working on to copy what that new entrant to the business was doing. And that new company, as we all know, is Apple.