Once again, the old excuse of leaving a job for 'personal reasons' has turned out to be business speak for 'jumping ship for a better role elsewhere', with Palm set to snap up Nokia's former MeeGo head Ari Jaaksi.

Jaaski's departure from Nokia made headlines at the start of October, seemingly indicative of wider problems at the Finnish firm, as new CEO Stephen Elop looks to stamp his vision on executives. 

Jaaski's appearance at Palm – which faces serious challenges of its own, trying to steady the webOS ship in time for a renewed attack on Android and iOS with version 2.0 – is likely to generate just as many column inches.

All Things Digital claims he'll be installed as the lead of Palm's engineering team by November.

Dropping into the Palm pot

But Palm isn't just poaching from Nokia. Also set to make the leap is Samsung's former R&D head Victoria Coleman who'll work on app development for future webOS releases.

 

Likewise, parent company HP will reportedly donate Steven McArthur as product marketing head, Enrique Lores as sales organisation lead and Steve Manser as product management head.

It's a much needed dose of fresh blood for Palm.

Amongst others, the firm lost webOS interface designer Matias Duarte to Google in May, with Duarte widely accredited as the linchpin of the platform's acclaimed UI.

Jaaski and co will now need to work on solidifying support for webOS 2.0, which is currently scheduled to launch before the end of 2010.

[source: All Things Digital]