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Palm Hires Former Apple Engineer

Friday, March 9th, 2007 at 10:50 AM - by

Palm CEO Ed Colligan may not be excited about the iPhone, but that hasn't stopped his company from hiring former Apple engineer and iPod interface alumni Paul Mercer. The New York Times reports that Mr. Mercer joined Palm three weeks ago to work on a new line of products.

Palm representatives aren't elaborating on what Mr. Mercer is working on. But considering the age of Palm's current Treo smart phone line up, it's easy to assume he will be working on some type of device designed to breath new life into the Palm platform, and potentially compete with Apple's iPhone.

Mr. Mercer started with Apple in 1987, and was a lead designer for Mac System 7. After leaving Apple, he launched Pixo - the company that Apple went to for the tools to create the first iPod interface. Since then, he has also worked on Samsung's Z5 MP3 player.

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Fri Mar 09, 2007 9:08 pm

Paul Mercer is just one guy, so he's an "alumnus."

That said, Paul Mercer is quite brilliant, and a pioneer in palmtop computers. Working at Apple, he invented the Swatch, which was a prototype pocket-sized Mac based on a Sony palmtop hardware platform, running System 6 (you could drag files to it using AppleTalk, run HyperCard on it, print to LaserWriters, etc..) Unfortunately, it was killed in deference to the Newton, but everything old is new again with the iPhone running (Mac?) OS X!

Of course while Newton may have died, its ARM/StrongARM processor made a lot of money for Apple, and a descendant (XScale) is used in the iPod and the iPhone...

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