Word: palmful
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...stumbles, Palm might never catch up. The industry sets a blistering pace, and Palm is already late to market. But if anything worries the famously secretive Apple (which, it goes almost without saying, declined to comment for this story), it has to be Rubinstein. He wasn't merely once an Apple insider; he was in the inner circle, a man close to Steve Jobs himself who helped overhaul the engineering processes core to Apple's turnaround. He worked on the top projects at 1 Infinite Loop and, for a time at least, got to see where Apple was headed...
...investigation of an options-backdating scandal in 2007. He settled the case without admitting wrongdoing but blamed the CEO for leaving him exposed. Not coincidentally, at about that time, Anderson joined Elevation Partners, a private-equity firm that had invested $325 million to buy a 26% share of Palm. (It now owns 34%.) Thinking that Rubinstein was just what Palm needed to right itself, Anderson introduced him to Ed Colligan, Palm's CEO. Colligan visited Rubinstein in Mexico and ultimately convinced him that Palm needed him to orchestrate a Jobs-style reinvention...
Seeing the Future in Palm As he dug deeper, Rubinstein saw a pattern that intrigued him. Palm's first hit was the Pilot, which pretty much created the personal digital assistant (PDA). It enabled people to organize all their stuff on a computer, then sync it to the device. Handspring, Palm's successor in a convoluted corporate history, merged the PDA with a cell phone, but to Rubinstein it was sync that stuck out: "We looked at Palm's DNA and said, 'What made it great?' Synching - from Day One, Palm has been about synching." But these days, people...
...have issues. I've used two for the past few weeks and run into a couple of early glitches. One was an operating-system bug that caused my first Pre to crash. Fixed, says the company. The other was a hardware issue that drained my battery in five hours. Palm says that's an anomaly but is investigating. The other things I disliked are pretty minor and easily corrected. Cut and paste is very limited and clumsy to use; there are only a dozen applications available at launch, and your IT guys can't remotely wipe...
Still, Rubinstein has managed to keep Palm in the race. The Pre ought to find new converts, but it is Palm's WebOS that's the key to success. Rubinstein told me that Palm is working on an array of mobile Internet devices, all powered by WebOS, which he argues - persuasively - is built to last a decade or more...