Ex-Palm boss quits HP

Jon Rubinstein, former Palm chief and head of HP's mobility, has left the company as it ramps up its webOS open source program. 

Rubinstein, who gained notoriety for his work on Apple's first iPod, joined HP through its 2010 acquisition of Palm and from there headed up HP's efforts to develop webOS and its failed TouchPad.

The executive will take a "well deserved" break after working on webOS for the past four years, he told All Things Digital. 

Rubinstein had fulfilled his two-year contracted tenure with the company, an HP spokesman said.

Shortly after the July launch of the webOS-based tablet, TouchPad, killed by former HP chief Leo Apotheker a month later, Rubinstein was moved from mobility to a "product innovation" role within its wider PC business, Personal Systems Group.    

HP last week kicked off its open source program for webOS announced last December, releasing Enyo, its webOS JavaScript application framework that lets developers write apps once for multiple platforms across mobiles and desktops.  

The company provided an updated roadmap for webOS last week, detailing that it would release a new kernel based on the Linux Foundation's standard kernel.

The tablet market HP exited has more than doubled since 2010, with vendors shipping 66.9 million units across the globe last calendar year compared with 18.6 million the year prior, according to analyst firm Strategy Analytics.

The device class continues to be dominated by Apple, which shipped 15.43 million iPads last quarter, while Android device makers collectively shipped 10 million.