He's just one Jobs ex among many. A quick tally:

• Palm's financial backer, Elevation Partners, employs Fred Anderson, the former Apple CFO who publicly battled with Jobs over blame for Apple's stock-options backdating scandal.
  
• The company also hired away Apple's former head of Mac PR, Lynn Fox.
  
• Then there was the poaching of Mike Bell, who had been at Apple for 16 years and was senior VP for product development.

Palm's hiring spree grew so annoying to Jobs that he supposedly called up Rubinstein and screamed at him.

Jobs had reason to be agitated. Rubinstein successfully instigated a crash development program that, somehow, conjured an incredibly slick device, the Pre, from a company whose technology had been languishing for years.

In the words of tech blogger John Gruber, "it's quite possible that they have done everything right since" the launch of the iPhone. "Palm designed, built, and released the Pre, WebOS, and an app store, all in about two years."

The Palm team's experience at Apple no doubt helped along the way; it would appear some very detailed knowledge of Apple's iTunes helped allow the Pre to magically sync with the media software, an impressive feat.

The Pre, just released, promises to give Apple's iPhone the most worrisome competition it's yet seen.

And now Rubinstein has his prize, taking control of the whole company from 16-year Palm veteran Ed Colligan. If Jobs needed a catalyst to get him fired up about his return to the helm of Apple later this month, he sure got it.

Cha complains that reps for Sprint and Palm have shown the device off at trade shows, but won't actually let go. At all times, someone acting in their official capacity is hanging desperately onto the Pre, which it announced in January but has yet to release on the market.

Palm spokeswoman Lynn Fox, reached at a deli in New York after spending a day letting radio shock jock Howard Stern get both of his greasy mitts all over the Pre, explained that the company "didn't want to play a game of pass-the-device in a crowded room." She suggested but did not quite spell out the no-win prospect of wrestling the precious, Bono-funded device out of an deranged blogger's hands.

We think the policy is utterly wrongheaded. We can't think of better publicity than a gadget hound, surrounded by a crowd of flacks huffing and sighing, defying their disapproval to hold onto the Pre.