Palm's Design Guru Matias Duarte joins Google as User Experience Director for Android

[BigRick10]

We'd heard rumors this morning that webOS design guru Matias Duarte had left Palm for Google, but now we've got it straight from Mountain View: Mr. Duarte is the new User Experience Director for Android. If you'll remember, Matias previously worked on Sidekick with Android head Andy Rubin, so it's a reunion of sorts for these two -- we're pretty excited to see where they take Android in the future. As for Palm, well, we're sure HP has plenty of talented designers waiting to lead webOS into the wild world of tablets, netbooks and, uh, printers, so we'll see what happens there -- things could get crazy on both sides of this transition.

Looks like more good thing are to come for Android!

 

[Kyle Gibb]

Android's UI is probably the thing that needs the most work. Having a sexy and easy to use UI is probably the biggest factor in many peoples' smart phone buying decisions.

 

[Hearthatvoiceagain]

I see this guys arrival as good news for the future of the "Fragmentation" or "Legacy" (Can we have just one word - Fragacy maybe?) issue.

Its like this. Android is great, but not all that stylish. As a result we get OEMs building pretty front ends on top. Now if there were no demand they wouldn't do this. If Matias Duarte can make stock ASOP Android look really good then people would happily abandon Sense et al for stock, the OEM's would get the message that their overlays were surplus to requirements and one of the hurdles to upgrading would be removed.