As an ex-Apple engineer who worked on Apple’s System 7 Mac OS as the lead designer, and Apple’s most successful product ever, the iPod, and who also helped design Samsung’s Z5 mp3 player interface, Mercer has some serious design cred to his name and stands an excellent chance of truly helping Palm develop competitive new products.

This comes at a time when Apple’s iPhone moves have forced cell phone manufacturers to now really start thinking about software design, instead of just packing in ever more hardware features into ever smaller phones.

Palm had little to say beyond confirming Mercer’s appointment, although industry analysts speak highly of Mercer’s skills and abilities.

It also comes at a time when Palm founder Jeff Hawkins has recently promised to deliver a mysterious new product in May, which Hawkins cryptically described as a response to “a world where everyone has a super high-speed Internet connection in their pocket and many gigabytes of storage, super-fast processors, audio, visual and multimedia”, although Palm's last 'new' product, the LifeDrive with a large iPhone style screen, didn't really resonate with consumers.

It also comes at a time when there is renewed speculation about both a new version of the Palm OS and the possibility that Palm is up for sale, with Nokia and HTC mentioned in media reports as possible suitors keen to capitalize on the Palm brand name despite already having strong brands that sell in the tens of millions, if not more, every year. {moscomment}