14 DAY TRIAL // If you thought Palm will probably fade away so we won't hear nothing about them in the next few years because they will not be able to compete with the new handsets launched on the market and their revolutionary Oss and GUIs, well, you're wrong.
Palm has made a decisive move that will enable the company to enter the competition begun by the launch of the iPhone handset in January, a move that will give them a chance to compete with the mobile phone manufacturers which have already entered this revolutionary user interface war. I'm talking about LG, Samsung, Apple and others that, for now, only intend to make an entrance in this race by launching their own devices.
The thing that will bring a breath of fresh air in the Palm headquarters and will probably mean they will begin working on a new OS (after dumping PalmOS and trying Microsoft's Windows Mobile OS on their Treo 700w handset) is the hiring of a former Apple computer engineer, by his name Paul Mercer.
If you haven't heard before about him and you don't know what he has done for Apple, let me explain. He was hired by Apple in 1987 as the lead designer of the Version 7 of the Macintosh Finder. Afterwards, he founded Pixo, a firm specialized in software tools, which eventually created a development system that was used by the Apple engineers to build the first UI version of the iPod music player.
Later he designed for Samsung the Z5 MP3 player which was a huge success and a best seller in South Korea. As Paul Saffo, one of Samsung's advisers and a Silicon Valley forecaster says "he's the best of the best in this space. The guy has a knack for designing complex systems in ways that are accessible."
So what should we expect next from Palm? It would be for the best if they will profit from Mercer's experience and pump themselves up a bit so they can have a word to say in the fast developing mobile market of today.
The most important thing they have to do now is to create a new, innovative and easy usable interface for their future to be launched handsets and, maybe, if they have the know-how and the courage to enter the open race for the most revolutionary mobile handset going on between world's biggest mobile players (I'm sure everyone knows at least 3 of the top mobile phone manufacturers so I suppose that making a list here would be unnecessary).