Palm Pre & iTunes Working Together
June 9, 2009 by Ryan Ray
As much as this has to do with the Palm Pre, this has to do with the iPhone. As you all may or may not know the Palm Pre is supposedly the holy grail for Palm. It’s no secret that Palm has been in trouble for quite some time. Even long before the iPhone came along Palm was in need of a great phone to save itself. At one time in my life I actually did own a Palm Treo. I don’t remember which one it was maybe the 650? Some weird number naming scheme that no one can remember. It had a touchscreen, semi worked and semi didn’t. It also came with those things that we use to call stylus. It was an ironic name because nothing about the stylus was stylish. That’s why when the Blackberry came along it was the king of cool, effectively putting Palm in it’s coffin. As they say and I firmly believe the iPhone was the nail to that coffin. It hasn’t came to fruition yet, but it will happen. Luckily for Palm the Pre will keep it afloat a little longer. I was hoping that yesterday Apple would give us some great news about the iPhone, instead we got a decent update and crap from AT&T. No tethering until late in the summer? A BIG WTF for AT&T, I love my iPhone but AT&T really needs to get with it to keep Apple’s partnership. Otherwise you are going to have over 40 million unhappy iPhone owners jumping ship.
Anyway back to talking about iTunes and the Pre. Apparently Palm has tried to one up Apple and let the Palm Pre sync with iTunes. It doesn’t have full sync features like an iPhone does. Where you just plug in the iPhone and it easily syncs up everything, but somehow if this is legal or not Palm’s Pre when plugged in to iTunes will tell iTunes it’s an iPod and then it syncs as if it were one. HERE is a website with a better explanation. They also say Apple can easily patch this in the next iTunes update, and I for one definitely think we will be seeing that. I think there may be something illegal about that. It at least breaks USB standards and could not be allowed to claim the device is USB capable.
It’s weird that Palm would give their users such a shoddy launch. The OS has 18 apps and doesn’t feel complete, not to mention it’s on the web. What do you do without signal? Throw in the partial sync with iTunes and it seems as if Palm wanted to get the Pre out before the announcement of the new iPhone. The fact still stands and the point I want to make is that no matter how hard you try and imitate the iPhone you will never beat it. You must come up with an innovation on your own that matches or surpasses the iPhone. At least try and give users a lower cost, cough*AT&T*cough. The old iPhone 3G now costs less than the Pre by $100, and with OS 3.0 coming in a few days the Palm Pre only bought Palm about another 2 weeks of time. Good try Palm, from the media’s excitement about the Pre I’d say you’d come the closest to being a rival to the iPhone. Better luck next time.
What are your thoughts on this? What do you think about the issue of the Palm Pre syncing with iTunes? Can Palm not write their own syncing software? How about the Pre v. the iPhone 3G or iPhone 3GS? Leave a comment and let me know, I’d love to discuss it with you. Thanks for your time.
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