I was 15 when I got my first Palm, a Palm V. I immediately became involved in the community, online and in a local club of Toulouse, my hometown, and even started to write an application for Palm OS. I was fascinated by the power of those little devices —called PDAs a the time— that you could carry anywhere with you, and do a lot of what my big HP desktop computer could do at the time. Time changed, and as the number of reviews I was writing for PDAfrance grew I was testing more smartphone than PDAs. Here we are in 2011 where a lot of us have a smartphone that replaces a PDA, a camera, a camcorder, and with devices that are as powerful as our PCs. I’m convinced that tablets are soon going to replace laptops and PCs for a lot of us, and this is why we live a super exciting time for people that love mobile like I do.

All of this to announce that I left Seesmic a few weeks ago to start a new job at the Palm business unit of HP. It’s a little bit of a “back to the roots” for me and I’m super excited to be there in such an interesting time in the history of mobile computing. I’m now working as a Product Manager on the webOS Application Catalog (the “App Store” available on all webOS devices.) I’d like to thank Loic Le Meur and all the Seesmic team for this incredible 1.5 years where I had the chance to develop all the mobile applications Seesmic currently has. I learned a ton of things, met some amazing people and this experience just made me realize even more how much I love what I do, and how I wanted to be part of something even bigger. I think this is the best time to join HP and the webOS team. I always loved webOS, its unique design and the great features it offers compared to the competition. HP has 3 great products coming up, including the first Tablet running on webOS and I couldn’t be more excited by it and HP’s vision. If you want to learn more, I suggest you to watch the interview of Jon Rubinstein (SVP and General Manager of the Palm Global Business Unit at HP) on the Engadget Show from a few weeks ago. The new HP marketing campaign “Everybody On” (one of the ad is attached to this post, the others are on Youtube) also represent exactly why I’m excited by mobile devices.

I’ll post more content about webOS in the next few weeks, in the mean time you can always reach me on this blog as well as on Twitter at @mathieu.

I went to Japan for the first time a few weeks ago and it was fantastic. I liked it more than what I imagined. I enjoyed the people, the respect they have in things and in others, the pleasure and care they have in doing things. I loved the fact that most things, from objects to buildings, are kept simple and just do what they should do. There’s a lot of things to learn from Japan and the Japanese way of life. I can’t wait to go back to Japan and visit more countries in Asia.

During my trip, I visited Tokyo and then took the Shinkansen train to spend a couple days in Kyoto before going back to Tokyo and San Francisco. You can see the pictures I took on my Flickr and I also made a little video.

Nicolas Hayek was one of those people that I admire a lot. One of those people that are determined, extremely passionate and crazy enough to take on big challenges. He was clearly thinking differently. He saved the Swiss watch industry, and revolutionized it at the same time with Swatch. He was also part of this crazy project called the Smart car when it started in 1994. Nicolas passed away today at the age of 82, and will always remains a model to me.

Photo: Nicolas Hayek was known to wear up to four watches on each arm.