Confirmed: Palm's Matias Duarte joins Google as User Experience Director for Android

We'd heard rumors this morning that webOS design guru Matias Duarte had left Palm for Google, but now we've got it straight from Mountain View: Mr. Duarte is the new User Experience Director for Android. If you'll remember, Matias previously worked on Sidekick with Android head Andy Rubin, so it's a reunion of sorts for these two -- we're pretty excited to see where they take Android in the future. As for Palm, well, we're sure HP has plenty of talented designers waiting to lead webOS into the wild world of tablets, netbooks and, uh, printers, so we'll see what happens there -- things could get crazy on both sides of this transition.