theregoesdave

It’s been just over a year since Jon Rubenstein joined Palm, the embattled smartphone maker whose relevance is slipping in spite of creating the PDA some years ago. Palm has bet its future on ‘Ruby’ Rubenstein and we’re very close to seeing what the future holds.

Jon Rubenstein is best known as the father of the iPod, the MP3 player that reinvigorated Apple and helped the company to turn into a consumer electronics powerhouse. So when Palm lured him away from Apple last year, it was evident that they were banking on him to do it all over again at Palm.

What is the result of the last year of toil?

Palm will be previewing its new Nova mobile operating system in just a few weeks at CES. The show is scheduled for January 8-11 in Las Vegas, NV and is the largest event of the year for gadget and phone makers.

BusinessWeek profiled the Nova effort as an attempt to capture the broad center of the smartphone market. Palm hopes to create a platform that can support both the Enterprise market that has been catered to by Blackberry and the personal entertainment market currently being forged by Apple.

This is no small task for any phone maker. However with Apple dramatically changing the smartphone market from a bland beginning in personal productivity PDAs, now could be the time to redesign a mobile OS that can truly take on all of these tasks.

We’ll just have to wait a few more weeks to see if Ruby can pull it off. No pressure.

• Palm Pre unveiled running Nova dubbed WebOS
• Apple iPhone passes RIM in second year
• Palm Pixi joins the Pre on Sprint
• iPhone Users Only a Small Percentage of Overall Mobile Web
• Why the Blackberry Storm Could Spell Trouble for RIM