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With the iPhone (see side image) Apple is heralding a shift of cell phone industry focus on hardware to software, according to an article in The New York Times article. As a result, Palm, Inc. has hired a Silicon Valley software designer to answer this challenge.

What's interesting about the hiring of Paul Mercer, who has been at work for several weeks now on a new line of Palm products, is that he is a former Apple engineer. Not just any engineer mind you, but one who "has developed a reputation for designing interfaces that have cinematographic qualities and yet perform briskly on small consumer electronics devices."


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Mercer joined Apple in 1987, where he led the design of the graphical desktop for the Mac OS with Version 7 of the Macintosh finder. Later, his own company Pixo provided Apple with the development system used by its designers to create the first iPod user interface.

Palm brought Mercer over (along with two other people) from design firm Iventor, which he lead. Of late, Mercer designed the popluar (in Korea) Z5 MP3 player for Samsung.

“He’s the best of the best in this space,” Silicon Valley forecaster and Samsung Advisor Paul Saffo commented to the The Times. “The guy has a knack for designing complex systems in ways that are accessible.”

Perhaps he'll help to spruce up the aging Garnet OS (once called Palm OS Garnet) for upcoming Palm devices, contribute to future versions of the platform, or help Palm bring more value-added features to the mobile device maker's Windows Mobile smartphones.

If Garnet is going to be improved it has got to be on the part of Palm and not ACCESS (formally PalmSource). The latter is concentrating on its upcoming ACCESS Linux Platform and no longer updating the former Palm OS. While the former inked a $44 million deal with ACCESS last year for a perpetual license to the platform, leaving Palm free to do what it pleases with the aging OS.