It’s about time some­thing went Palm’s way. And now, sud­denly, every­thing seems to be going Palm’s way. They blew every­one away at CES, are get­ting tons of pos­i­tive press in the national media, and now, their biggest rival in the mobile space looks primed to falter.

I don’t think any­one at Palm was root­ing for Jobs to step down for health rea­sons, but the sit­u­a­tion is what it is. Cur­rently the mobile mar­ket is Apple’s to lose, but their hold is a lot more ten­u­ous than it ini­tially appears. No one has a lock on the still grow­ing mobile mar­ket, no one has estab­lished numer­i­cal dom­i­nance, and Apple’s early lead in a field that has only just recently pen­e­trated the con­scious­ness of “nor­mal” con­sumers could eas­ily repeat their early lead in per­sonal com­put­ing, and we see how that turned out.

And now, Apple is los­ing their rud­der. Steve Jobs, the “tyrant with excep­tional taste” that has dri­ven Apple in all their suc­cess­ful years, is tak­ing an indef­i­nite leave of absence from the com­pany. He says he’ll be back by sum­mer, but given how much he’s pub­li­cally under­es­ti­mated his health prob­lems already, many ana­lysts think this is really the end of the Jobs era and he won’t be com­ing back, ever. As 2009 wears on, Tim Cook will offi­cially lead the com­pany he’s been de facto lead­ing for a while now.

But there will be a dif­fer­ence. Cook may have kept the trains run­ning on time, but Jobs was the vision­ary. Jobs was the cre­ative force behind Apple’s big moves. With­out him, Apple will have a ten­dency to coast, to con­tinue doing what they know already works and stop inno­vat­ing. (It’s worth not­ing that the inter­nal force at Apple really respon­si­ble for two of their big Jobs 2.0 inno­va­tions, the first iMac and the iPod, is Palm’s Jon Rubenstein.)

So Palm may have an oppor­tu­nity here to swipe smart­phone dom­i­nance out from under a sleep­ing Apple. If the Pre really is every­thing peo­ple like about the iPhone and fixes every­thing peo­ple don’t like about the iPhone, Palm really could have the tri­fecta of industry-​defining devices (Pilot, Treo, Pre) and take the lead as the com­pany every­one else wants to beat. Before CES, I wouldn’t have bet that Palm could exe­cute well enough to take advan­tage of that oppor­tu­nity, but now I’m not so sure. Ed Colligan’s expe­ri­ence with mobile and the cell phone mar­ket com­bined with Jon Rubenstein’s knack for inno­va­tion and design are prov­ing a tough com­bi­na­tion to beat.