Anderson, Rubinstein Join Palm Board


Former Apple CFO Fred Anderson and former VP of hardware engineering, Jon Rubinstein, will join Palm Inc's board, Macworld reports.

Anderson joins Palm as part of an equity deal with Elevation Partners, which is headed by Anderson and Roger McNamee. Recently, Anderson was targeted in an SEC investigation of Apple's backdated share options affair, which saw the former CFO pay back several million dollars, as well as agreeing to pay a large fine.

At Apple, Rubinstein oversaw the hardware development of iMac and iPod, latterly heading the spin-off iPod division at Apple. Rubinstein will act as executive chairman of Palm.

Palm has been a frequent destination of Apple alumni, with David Nagel previously heading the company as CEO.

Elevation Partners will invest $325 million in Palm. The company has moved in recent years from PIMs to smartphones. However, it has also experienced considerable competition from Windows Mobile devices in recent years, forcing the company to move from exclusively Palm OS-based devices to devices that also support Windows Mobile.