Palm OS Is Getting a Face Lift

This revelation this past weekend that Matias Duarte is working for Palm suggests that Palm OS II/Nova will be getting a much needed face lift when it is finally released on a production device.

To be honest, I didn’t know who Matias Duarte was until I read a post over on Engadget . It seems that Mr. Duarte was instrumental in designing the Sidekick and Helios smart device interfaces. What caught my attention about the article, was that Mr. Duarte is now working for Palm. As a matter of fact, he apparently has been working for Palm since September of 2007. I now have to wonder if Mr. Duarte wasn’t one of the first high-profile industry people that Palm’s new Executive Chairman Jon Rubinstein recruited.

Palm has been trying to rebuild itself since it reacquired the full rights to all things “Palm” from ACCESS, the parent company of the Palm spin-off company, PalmSource. (That story, is a soap opera, so I won’t get into all the details here.) While Palm tried to pull off their own reboot, it wasn’t until 2007 during the lead up to private equity firm Elevation Partners taking a 27% stake in Palm did things begin to get serious about a new mobile operating system.

From the little we do know about the Palm product roadmap, Mr. Duarte will have been on staff working for Palm a full 15 months before the work on the core Palm OS II/Nova code is complete. With Palm devices not expected to begin shipping with the new OS until the end of the first quarter at the earliest, Mr. Duarte will have been on staff for a full 18 months. That is plenty of time to develop a new user interface for the new software.  We should also not lose site of the fact that Palm has also hired on Pual Mercer, another well known interface designer in early 2007.

While researching Mr. Duarte’s background, I found the following two passages on his blog, "matias duarte 4.0". The first is from an article written for Print Magazine by Jeff Howe titled "One Cellular Sensation".  Mr. Howe writes:

“It’s an interesting time for mobile design,” says Matias Duarte, chief designer at Helio, a U.S. cellular carrier operated by South Korean phone giant SK Telecom. “The field is in transition from a technology to a design medium, much like the web was in the mid-’90s.”

The second, is a clearification Duarte wrote on his blog in response to what had been written by Mr. Howe:

“I’m only sorry I didn’t quite communicate just how radical I think the coming change in mobile design will be. The Web today is the result of a leap forward from it’s infancy just as great as the one from the Apple II to Mac OS X was. Yet that transition took place over ten years. I expect we’re soon going to be using [a] UI that’s more Minority Report than OS X on our devices. Hold on to your hat.”

This transition that Duarte was talking about back in February 2007 has already started; and it will be disruptive.  In other words, it will change how we view mobile computer and interact with mobile hardware and software. Apple’s iPhone is proof of how disruptive a well thought out design can be. The question is whether or not Palm can successfully reinvent itself with Palm OS II/Nova? What part will Mr. Duarte play in that transformation?

The next generation of user interfaces will be disruptive (remember, this is a good thing) and will change the way with think about mobile computing. Palm’s new interface needs to be set the standard for easy of use in future Palm products. People use computers to make their lives easier. We want to get tasks done without having to worry about the underlying software. We want to interact with applications written for the web, communicate with others via text messaging, email, and voice. We want to be able to stream audio and video on demand. And, if it isn't too much to ask, to help us stay organized. We want all of these benefits without being forced to read the manual. To make this all possible, you need a streamlined, simple, and elegant interface. Palm had better be up to the challenge to hold their own in a market that is rushing to clone every detail of the iPhone. By bringing Matias Duarte, and other talented individuals on board, I believe that Palm is well on the way to becoming a world-class solution provider once again.