Did Palm’s Joe Rubinstein say he’s never, not once ever touched an Apple iPhone. Not in 2.5 years. Not one? According to Digital Daily, that’s just exactly what he said.

Now we don’t think everyone has to have at least tried an iPhone, but when you’re the CEO of another smartphone company these days, especially when you’re a CEO who came from Apple, where you were the “father of the iPod”… frankly we have a hard time believing this is anything other than a misquote or misinterpretation of what he said. Even though there’s doesn’t seem to be much room for either –

“We don’t pay that much attention to Apple….I know it sounds really strange,” says Rubinstein.

“Really?” Kara replies. “You don’t worry about the iPhone?”

“No, I really don’t,” Rubinstein answers.

“I don’t believe you,” says Kara, telegraphing a sentiment I imagine is widely held among the audience.

Rubinstein: “I don’t have an iPhone. I’ve never even used one.”

I think I just heard Palm’s entire PR team audibly groan.

According to Gizmodo, he lacks the Sun Tzu. Our guess? He’s got an iPod touch.

New Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein was the debut guest on the brand new The Engadget Show, and host Joshua Topolsky asked many of the questions that needed asking. Starting off with some of Ruby’s history at NeXT and Apple with Steve Jobs and his role in resurrecting the latter with products like the iMac and iPod, they segued into Palm talk for a bit, before bringing in back around to more controversial topics like Palm holding product announcements/releases right before annual Apple iPhone/iPod events, and the ongoing Palm “hacking” iTunes sync saga.

Fascinating interview, and awesome start for the Engadget crew. Congrats on the new endeavor, and we can’t wait to see if Jobs, Schiller, Cook, Joz, or Forstall show up next…

It’s been suspected for a while now, but PreCentral.net let us know that Palm has gone and made it all official-like:

Palm, Inc. (Nasdaq: PALM) today announced that its board of directors has appointed Jon Rubinstein to lead the company as Chairman and CEO upon the departure of Ed Colligan, who is stepping down after sixteen years of leadership at the company. Rubinstein, who joined Palm as Executive Chairman in October 2007 to help bring innovation back to the company, assumes his role as CEO on June 12. Colligan plans to take some time off, then join Elevation Partners.

As mighty Zeus did before him, Rubinstein came from Apple to slay the titans of Palm past and bring a powerful new pantheon of WebOS devices into their own.

So the former head of iPod hardware becomes the new head of Palm every-ware, and Ruby brings his vision of the iPhone-come-Pre head-to-head with the actual iPhone — and more interestingly — his once and former master, Steve Jobs.

Best of luck!

Meanwhile, TiPb would like to bid a fond farewell to Ed Colligan, who helped found the very industry we hold so dear. Many of us have owned many Palm Pilots and Visor and Palm Treo devices (and Dieter likely still has every single one of them on his desk!) and each was wonderful and innovative in its own time. Enjoy your much-earned respite and here’s wishing health, happiness, and much success with your future endeavors.

Standing ovation

(And who knows, a year from now Colligan might just pop up at RIM with a new OS of his own — how’d that be for poetry?)

As Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak paid rapt attention (via Engadget), Palm’s new dynamic duo, Jon Rubinstein and Roger McNamee took turns amazing, informing, and stupefying the crowd at All-Things Digital’s D7 conference. Our sibling site, PreCentral.net has complete coverage, but from an iPhone perspective there were a few things worth drawing attention to…

The good: Ruby and Mac, straight and funny man respectively, were an awesome combination in the best, most comedic sense of the term. Palm should make sure their contracts say they need to co-host all future events. Presentation Gold. Ruby controlled the message and acted the responsible corporate governor while Mac was left to make outrageous claims and obfuscate the tough questions. And it worked brilliantly. Their opening video alone, which self-deprecatingly poked at Mac’s history of grandiose statements all the while letting him slip in even more jabs, such as the terminal “[Palm Pre] eats iPhone’s for breakfast.”

The bad: when demonstrating the previously mentioned Palm Pre iTunes sync, comments were made about Apple being “monopolistic”. Puh-leeze. Palm has an absolute right to make their own desktop client (they already make Palm Desktop for example). They don’t have the right to hook into Apple’s without license, even if Apple has the most popular media client on the planet. To make it simple for them, no matter how popular McDonald’s is, they have the right to serve their own fries with their Big Macs. Burger King DOES NOT have the right to set up a stall inside McDonald’s and hook up Whoppers next to the MacFries machine — unless McDonald’s says it’s okay.

Tangent: Telling Palm Pre users they can hook up and sync with iTunes, even if you specify “DRM free music, photos (?!), and videos” is all fun and games until a) users can’t transfer their iPhone apps and blame Apple, b) a routine (or not so) update to iTunes breaks Pre compatibility and users blame Apple.

The ugly: Great as Ruby and Mac were together, Ruby couldn’t stop Mac from fully inserting his foot into his mouth towards the end. In a painfully, painfully drawn-out exchange with Kara Swisher, Mac began by saying the Pre had a mirror for woman, which Swisher immediately took exception to. Unrelenting, Mac continued to press the point about women being an ignored segment of the market, then took exception to Swisher’s exception, and basically ended up writing the title for this here blog post, casting the Palm Pre as the “iPhone for Ladies” — insulting women and potentially turning off a segment of their male audience as well. Sad, given the great start to the show.

So that was likely the last big Palm song and dance before release, and it was a mixed bag and perhaps a changing of the guard as well. A lot was made of Ruby’s Apple pedigree and experience — and we couldn’t help but notice that after Ruby’s comments that he basically rescued the Pre from resistive hell, Palm founder Ed Colligan was nowhere to be seen. If the Palm Pre is Ruby’s iPhone, maybe we’ve just met the new iPalm?