AllThingsDigital’s Arik Hesseldahl reports today that Jon Rubinstein, who spearheaded Palm’s comeback in phones before the company was bought by Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), has left the company, having finished out his commitment with HP.
HP late last year cancelled its plans to sell phones and tablets based on the Palm WebOS software, including the company’s TouchPad tablet, and has said it will give the WebOS code to the open source community.
Hasseldahl cites an HP spokesperson, notes Rubinstein had no immediate plans for his next venture, and offers a brief comment by Rubinstein, who remarked, “I am going to take a well deserved break after four and a half years of developing webOS.”
However, Hesseldahl’s colleague, John Paczkowski, offers some further tidbits from a chat today with Rubinstein that followed the earlier news item. In that interview, Rubinstein says that he had always expected to leave the Palm unit once the TouchPad shipped, which it did last summer. He agreed, however, to stay a little longer as an advisor. Rubinstein declines to speculate as to why the TouchPad never achieved significant sales, and says he “never had an opinion” about Palm being sold to HP, that it was simply “a process” that happened, as acquisitions do.
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