Palm has quietly hired a new Senior Vice President of Product Development, taking over for the departed Mike Farese who left last September. The new SVP Mike Bell comes to Palm after a 16 year tenure at Apple, where he was vice president, CPU Software, in the Macintosh Hardware Division. According to Palm’s executive bio, Bell led a host of efforts in a variety of roles, including overall product development leadership for the Airport line of products and low-level software for all Macintosh hardware products.