There's been no direct confirmation just yet, but
Fortune has it that Palm's hotly anticipated
Pre actually syncs with iTunes. Yeah,
iTunes. According to the report, the Pre works "seamlessly" with iTunes on a Mac, with the only notable limitation being that it can't handle older
DRM-laced files from the sad, sad days of our past. Even wilder, we're told that the iTunes Store "treats the Pre just as it would an iPod or an iPhone" save for the aforesaid exception, which leads us to wonder how Apple will react. There's little doubt that this factoid sweetens the Pre value proposition for diligent Mac users, but is this functionality kosher with the software's creator? We already saw Tim Cook glance sternly at Palm while uttering that if anyone else "
ripped off its intellectual property, it would go after them," and we highly doubt he plans on backing down if push comes to shove. If true, this could definitely trigger an interesting chain of events -- we'll know
soon enough, now won't we?
[Via
TUAW]
posted May 28th 2009 10:01AM
It's kind of funny that 'lack of sync-ability' was on that internal AT&T doc comparing the iphone to the pre and then this 'news' comes out.
I was just thinking the same thing, everyone had that as a negative on their "smear" sheets, time to think up something else.
Who would want to use the resource-hogging iTunes on their Pre??? I'll pass on that. Thanks anyway.
uh dude, you're just able to sync your songs using iTunes, you're not actually "running" iTunes on the Pre...
That's good news. iTunes is overbloated crap ware.
Well they wouldn't be the only ones to license this ability. There's a whole list of PMPs who have done so:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2172?viewlocale=en_US
I would think though that the Pre would be a bit more scary for Apple than the Creative and SONIC products. The iPod clearly dominates the mp3 player market, but a direct competitor like the Pre may cause them to somehow block it.
Just a thought.
Blackberry has been doing this since... last October? I'd therefore be shocked if Palm couldn't do it 8 months thereafter. With Blackberry, it happens if you go to www.blackberry.com/mediasync - and then it syncs, sans the DRM-protected content.