Apple Inc. may be gearing up for a phone fight with one its most distinguished alums.
Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief operating officer, told The New York Times last week that his company would not allow its intellectual property to be “ripped off.”
“We’ll use whatever weapons we have out disposal,” said Cook, who is leading Apple while CEO Steve Jobs is on sick leave.
The Times interpreted Cook’s remarks as a shot at Palm Inc., a struggling cell phone maker that has developed a new touch-screen smartphone, the Pre, that has some resemblances to the Apple iPhone.
Jonathan Rubinstein, Palm’s executive chairman, is a former Apple executive who helped launch the company’s wildly successful iPod, as well as its iMac and iBook.
Rubinstein was brought to Palm in 2007 to help that company regain some of the market share it had lost to the iPhone and to the BlackBerry phones made by Research in Motion.
When he unveiled the Pre at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas earlier this month, Rubinstein downplayed any resemblances between the Pre and the iPhone.
“Our intention was never to build an iPhone killer but to build a killer Palm product,” he told the Times.
The Pre is expected to go on sale in the first half of the year. It will be distributed by Sprint.
David Pogue, the Times’ personal tech columnist, tested the Pre for about 10 minutes at the electronics show. He came away gushing.
“Palm has created a spectacular, beautiful, joyous machine,” Pogue wrote.
“The Palm Pre rips off the iPhone in plenty of spots — multi-touch, pinch to zoom in or out, flick to the next photo, online software catalog and so on,” he continued. “But it also brims with one completely new idea after another.”
Unlike the iPhone, the Pre can run more than one program at once, Pogue reported. It allows synching of multiple contact lists. It has a slide-out keyboard, and the user can remove the phone’s battery.
Whether or not the Pre has the iPhone’s DNA, it does seem like the kind of break-through product Rubinstein championed at Apple, a company he joined in 1997.
Rubinstein was recruited by Jobs, as the pair had worked together at NeXT Inc., the computer company Jobs started during his period of exile from Apple.
As described by the IEEE Spectrum Online, Rubinstein got the idea for what became the iPod early in 2001 when he was on a business trip for Apple in Japan.
Representatives of Toshiba, the electronics manufacturer, showed him a 1.8-inch hard drive that the company was developing. Toshiba wasn’t sure how to use the device. Rubinstein, however, realized that it could be the heart of the music player Apple was hoping to create.
By October of 2001, his idea became reality when Apple brought the iPod to market. It has since sold more than 175 million units.
Rubenstein, who is married to computer industry veteran Karen Richardson, left Apple in 2006.
“There was nothing negative about it,” he told Spectrum. “…I was not leaving because I was mad. I was just tired. I had worked with Steve for 16 years. He said that I deserved an award for that. We did some really great products together.”
See Palm video of Rubinstein unveiling the Pre.
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