Paul Mercer, a former Apple employee who was involved in the design of iPod’s user interface, is now an official Palm employee.

Mercer has apparently been working for more than three weeks now for the former glory of the PDA industry, Palm- with focus on a range of new products that have not been disclosed yet.

Mercer, 39, is accompanied at Palm by two other employees from Iventor, the independent design firm that he headed in Palo Alto, Calif., but Palm did not acquire the company, said the spokeswoman, Marlene Somsak. Palm is based in nearby Sunnyvale.

Mercer was the lead designer of the Version 7 of the Macintosh finder, the operating system’s graphical desktop. He later founded Pixo, a software tools firm that created a development system used by Apple designers to conceive the first version of the user interface for the iPod. Mercer also helped Samsung develop its Z5 line of flash based MP3 players, with microdrive-sized storage reaching 2GB and 4GB capacities.

According to PalmInfoCenter, Palm has also hired Marc Blank, who is known in Treo circles for his development of the popular Chattermail email client. This hiring will also end the development of Chattermail.

Rumors in the media indicated that Mercer’s hiring at Palm has something to do with the imminent stormy debut of Apple’s iPhone, which is slated for June. Although Apple did manage to obtain the right to use the iPhone name for its up-coming touch-screen cellphone (iPhone being since 1997 a rightful Cisco property), they hype around it by the time it comes out might fade away, considering that Apple’s telecom rivals like LG, Samsung and Nokia are developing similar models to fight the iPhone threat.

Still, Mercer’s hiring at Palm is definitely not a reason for exaggeration concerning a Palm-Apple rivalry. Even Palm founder Jeff Hawkins stated in a recent interview that it takes two years to design new products, so it will take some time before the company will ready a PDA equivalent for the iPhone (Mercer has only been working for three weeks).

There are some hints though that Palm is preparing an offensive to regain its former shine:

"We’re going to be announcing something…but I won’t tell you what it is…we will be launching this year, not in the distant future. I’ll give you a much bigger hint: I’m going to be speaking at Walt Mossberg’s D Conference in May. It’s a high-end industry conference. Anyway, I’m going to be giving a talk there, and that would be something for the Palm fans to keep a close watch on", said Jeff Hawkins in an interview with PalmAddicts.com.

Author: Dan Nicolae Alexa
Source: http://www.playfuls.com/

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