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Palm Pre To Sync Seamlessly With iTunes
Wired is reporting that Palm's new handheld device, the Pre, will be able to sync automagically with Apple's iTunes. Thanks to a team of ex-Apple engineers the Pre will sync everything but iPhone applications and some of the older Fairplay DRM music. "It does it by faking out iTunes, making the jukebox software think that it is connected to a real iPod. Hook it up and you'll be given three options: USB mass storage device, charging only or iTunes sync. This is a ballsy move from Palm, and we totally love it: a big fat middle finger at Apple. Apple will, we are sure, be readying its legal attack dogs as I write, and don't be at all surprised if an iTunes update pops up around June 6th. This fight just got a lot more interesting."
While I enjoy the big fat middle finger to Apple as much as the next guy, I firmly expect Apple to give the big fat legal cock in the ass back to Palm.
And when it comes to a winner, the middle finger loses to the fat cock every time.
Plug the Pre into a PC and you're offered the option of using the device as a USB drive, charging it or beginning a "media sync." Interesting, using media sync the Pre does indeed sync with iTunes, though it's hamstrung by Apple's DRM protected songs. Can't imagine Apple's too happy about that. Presumably, Apple legal is already drafting a letter. Pre appears to make iTunes think it's an iPod.
How is Apple going to feel about that, asks Walt. Rubinstein dodges a bit noting that there are a variety of ways of getting music out of iTunes. Walt pushes back pointing out that this is the first non-Apple device that is recognized as an Apple device by a Mac. Rubinstein dodges again. Seems he's pretty obviously using his Apple knowledge here. McNamee jumps in. Apple is "practically a monopolist," he says, adding that people should be able to use music that they purchase in what ever way they see fit.
Such a letter would be the stupidest move Apple has made in a long time. I already view them as monopolistic bastards with their iTunes website & iTunes application & iTunes DRM & iPod/iPhone lock-in scheme. I am sick and tired of explaining to my friends and family how to burn a DRM'd song from their computer to a CD and then rip that CD to an MP3 and then put that MP3 on their player of choice.
I am begging Palm to sue the hell out of Apple if Apple comes after them. Palm should sue Apple to release an API to interface with iTunes music store and utilize iTunes DRM (I'm not against DRM if the artist wants it just so long as anyone can use it in their applications) and also an API for hardware manufacturers to plug into iTunes! Am I the only person on earth that sees the necessity in this? Am I the only person on earth that sees this as a direct affront to a free market system?! How is this any different from Microsoft packaging IE with Windows?! In my book it's worse since it transcends so many different industries--not just software!
Apple's evilest move would be to just watch this happen and throw a wrench into the works every time they do an update to iTunes. Let Palm spend hours trying to figure it out so the Pre still interfaces with it. That way the consumers will experience bumps, be more prone to buying iPhones and if anyone sues them for monopolistic practices they can throw their hands up in defense and say, "What!? The Pre works fine with iTunes! I don't know why you can't figure it out!"
I'm so sick of this whole mess that I personally buy CDs or Amazon MP3s, rip the CDs with CDex to a format of my choice and then move said songs to my MP3 player of choice. Hell, I can play my music on my DVD player if I put it on the correct media.
My work here is dung.
I'm sure that Apple won't find a way to break this in an iTunes update down the road. They certainly have no history of breaking unlicensed addons... Nope...
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
iTunes currently supports about 20 non-iPod devices:
Nomad II Creative Labs USB
Nomad II MG Creative Labs USB
Nomad II c Creative Labs USB
Nomad Jukebox Creative Labs USB
Nomad Jukebox 20GB Creative Labs USB
Nomad Jukebox C Creative Labs USB
Novad MuVo Creative Labs USB
Rio One SONICBlue/S3 USB
Rio 500 SONICBlue/S3 USB
Rio 600 SONICBlue/S3 USB
Rio 800 SONICBlue/S3 USB
Rio 900 SONICBlue/S3 USB
Rio S10 SONICBlue/S3 USB
Rio S11 SONICBlue/S3 USB
Rio S30S SONICBlue/S3 USB
Rio S35S SONICBlue/S3 USB
Rio S50 SONICBlue/S3 USB
Rio Chiba SONICBlue/S3 USB
Rio Fuse SONICBlue/S3 USB
Rio Cali SONICBlue/S3 USB
psa]play 60 Nike USB
psa]play 120 Nike USB
SoundSpace 2 Nakamichi USB
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2172
A black hole is where God divided by 0
They are even documented on Apple's website. I'm not sure why it's a surprise that the Pre is also going to be able to sync with iTunes.
Honestly, who bases a whole product line on a "faking out" feature.
I'm no fan of DRM, and wish iTunes was more open to other devices, but to publish a whole iPhone "killer" on a kludge is just asking for trouble.
WTF are consumers going to do when Apple pushes an update that breaks this (intentionally, or not) and all of a sudden this marvelous sync stops working?
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
Or Apple could realize that the iTunes store is BIG money and AT&T does not cover the whole US with their network and let Palm sync music. Music people paid Apple to download. Apple has other issues to tackle rather than worrying about a marginalized company like Palm giving it free advertising while encouraging people to buy even more music from Apple. Heck, Apple might even lend an engineer to Palm so that there is less faking and more playing on Apple's terms. It has happened before. Probably be some lawyer rattling for Wall St. but so long as Apple is keeping its head low to avoid anti-trust lawsuits and Palm doesn't look like they are going to become a major player, Apple might just let let this one slide.
Is this really such a "big fat middle finger"? It's cementing iTunes as the default player and iTMS as the default music store, and putting Palm in the position of trying to pick up some of Apple's leftovers. Plus, if Apple doesn't like it, they can issue firmware updates and update iTunes, making everything connect some slightly different way, and suddenly Palm's stuff stops working.
If Palm really wanted to make trouble for Apple, they'd make their own alternative to iTunes, which wouldn't take much work. If they really didn't want to do it from scratch, I'm sure there are even some open source projects that could be used as a jumping-off point. And if they didn't want to make their own music store, they could probably strike a deal with Amazon. Now that would be a problem for Apple.
Well this knocks off one of the major reasons I was hesitating on getting the Pre. And lets not just assume Apple will sue. As others have pointed out, Apple does allow other players. But will movies and TV shows work? (no they are drm protected). Guess I'll have to rely on the Sling app for the Pre, or hopefully a hulu solution.
If experience with palm os on my trusty handspring is guide, Apple will be able to break this easily. Palm's USB driver was a total joke. The hotsync would regularly blue-screen windows in a multi-core or even hyperthreaded environment unless you forced affinity on the hotsync.exe. And they never fixed it. They couldn't even cope with seeing more than one core in a usb driver. One of the few apps I ever saw that could blue-screen windows.
And they only recently supplied drivers that worked under vista. And the still haven't released an x64 version.
Soured me on Palm forever. And proved their driver's dept sucks.
Will Amarok 1.4 work with the Pre?
I would love to have a Smart Phone that works well with Linux.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
As much as I'd like to mark you as flamebait, you actually have a point. Until the Palm Pre was announced, I was under the impression that Palm (as a company) had gone under. When looking to replace my faithful HP iPAQ h5550 PDA (god that was an awesome PDA) I asked around in the electronics shops about a palm device, the majority thought they didn't exist any more. So it's nice to see they've been working on something over the past few years (unlike the Duke Nukem Forever guys).
Is this a problem with the driver, sync app, or OS? Honestly, I would wonder why my OS couldn't protect itself from something going on with USB.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Pure speculation here but what if during that whole patent debate that Palm and Apple had regarding touch technology Apple conceded to let the Pre sync? Just a thought.
I mean I'm sure Apple told Palm, "Hey, you can't use multi-touch or anything like it."
So Palm said, "Oh yeah? Browse our portfolio. We've highlighted a number of patents the iPod, Touch, and iPhone clearly violate."
Apple: "Cross License?"
Palm: "Sure! Oh, and we want to sync to iTunes."
iTunes 8.1.2, "fixes syncing issues"
Dislike the Electoral College? Lobby your state to join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.
I'm so damn tired of reading about the Palm Pre. It's everywhere, and it's annoying.
...apparently (http://na.blackberry.com/eng/services/media/mediasync.jsp).
Granted, they use a separate app, but if I could control my music and media with iTunes and listen to it on my BB, that'd be good enough for me.
It's supposed to be completely automatic, but actually you have to press this button.
big fat middle finger? i don't think apple is much worried about it. it's more like pulling apple's finger, and apple farting a bit and saying excellent. my friends response: the Palm what? or do they still exist? this is the general response i get from people in Europe and Asia. as far as i am concerned Palm is going the way of the dodo.
Problem with the driver. Windows drivers are low level, you screw something up there, everything goes down (BSOD).
Why would Apple go the legal route?
Just block the damn device. When iSync my Gen 4 iPod iTunes knows it's a Gen 4 iPod. When I sync my shuffle, it knows it's a shuffle.
When I sync my Pre, it will know it's a Pre.
So just rev itunes to block it.
Or not, and just walk around acting like you're not scared. Frankly, I think the Pre is roughly the equivalent of pulling your goalie in the final minutes of your final playoff game when you're behind: a last ditch effort. Palm may well just die as a result, and maybe Apple should do nothing for a while and see what happens.
As an aside, I'm not sure why everybody thinks this is new. Diamond Rio players used to mount in iTunes and you could sync playlists. I have a Nike PSA Play sitting in a drawer that I bought in 1998 that did this. It stores...96MB of music thanks to the MMC expansion card I bought (not compatible with SD.) Woo hoo!
Skot Nelson music is my saviour / i was maimed by rock and roll
Except for movies. And TV shows. And audiobooks. Oh, and applications.
But yeah, besides those things, *totally* DRM free.
Seriously its not like Merlin waits around your computer and waves a wand to make it work.
The commercial software pocket tunes (http://www.pocket-tunes.com/) supports iTunes - Palm Sync for the models
Palm Centro
Palm T|X
Palm Treo 650
Palm Treo 680
Palm Treo 700p
Palm Treo 755p
and also for Windows Mobile. So it cannot be that hard to implement this for the new palm models..
That list, which is old, represents the 3rd party plugins which are bundled with iTunes by default. The SDK allows anyone to develop their own plugin. As someone else mentioned, Nokia has done this a long time ago. This could not be any more of a non-story. It's really bad reporting. It would've been more interesting to me if they had said that Palm made the Pre so that it could *not* sync music with iTunes. And the headline is incredibly misleading...it won't sync DRM music people may have in their libraries, and it won't sync movies, tv shows and most importantly apps purchased from iTunes. "This fight just got a lot more interesting." (sigh)
It's not all that hard to do when you control the software on the device:
http://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2009/03/14/rockboxitunes/
and soon to be ex-Palm engineers.
Palm exec: I thank you for all your effort in giving us the inside scoop on how Apple work. No I will have to fire you because you have shown yourself to not be a trust full person and we have no confidence that you will honor our NDA, as you have shown not to honor your previous employer.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
The money isn't in the iPhone or iPod, but it's in iTune. Don't get me wrong, making a bit of profit from selling the hardware is nice, but Apple really makes it money in the "supporting" side of the equation.
Think of it this way, for each iPod or iPhone, apple say makes $20 after all costs (development, support, etc) are assumed. They sell 4 million of these units and make a whopping $80 million dollars. That's chump change. If in 3 years of owning the iPhone or iPod, you download say about 2 dozen cheap games giving them say about $1 each, a few CDs worth of music, say about 50 songs where they make about $30 total. The iPhones and iPod make them about $208 million. This doesn't take into account any liability of a battery exploding, etc. Music/movie files have a low overhead and a low liability issue. they even duck the issue on apps as they are only a distribution service.
So if some hardware manufacturer wants to connect to iTunes, I seriously doubt Apple will give them much fuss so long as
1) They don't besmirch the Apple name
2) Apple makes a profit from them connecting to iTunes
3) They don't use any Apple IP in their product.
I find it more than a little ironic that before this item became news all the Pre supporters were saying iTunes was craptastic and claiming the lack of syncing on the Pre as a feature. Everything's in "the cloud", so who needs desktop tethering?
Ahhh, but now that it syncs with iTunes, suddenly Palm is super-genius for supporting and iTunes support is [i]obviously[/i] a major selling point.
Whatever. When Apple blocks it and it doesn't sync, I'm sure syncing will suddenly not be important again.
They were on the verge because PalmOS is crap and Palm Desktop is steaming crap, and they both look rosey compared to palm's technical support.
I just threw away my T2 and got a touch, and love it. From repeated bad experiences of my own and almost everyone I know with palm, I hope apple reams them good, give them a twist for me while you're at it.
Too little, too late, palm.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
That, though, is a design flaw common to everything that doesn't use a microkernel. Even linux suffers from this problem, despite the continuing efforts of microkernel enthusiasts. Some day I'd like to see a mainstream OS with a kernel that can't be crashed by a driver, because I want to look back on this as the "bad old days".
Just another "DOJ fascist authoritarian totalitarian bootlicker" -- Zeio
Yes, hot and fresh, right off the grill.
To hell with iTunes, I just want to sync my Palm (my existing Palm) with Palm Desktop on my Macbook, without going through a third party product that wants to OWN my PDA.
Back when I had Palm Desktop and Hotsync, I could sync my PDA with my office desktop and my home desktop and my laptop and everything Just Worked. Then I had to start syncing with Lorus Notes at the office, and tried two third paty syncing products, and the best I could manage was syncing with TWO computers. Then Palm gave up on Hotsync, and now I'm using Missing Sync and my PDA is tethered to my Macbook. Not only that, but I can't get it to sync notes at all.
I don't know what I'll do when my current PDA finally dies. I never liked PDAs at all until I got a Palm, I tried a Pocket PC for a while and it screwed up my data... but even Palm doesn't support Palms any more.
the community is all of the people who will develop for the new palm OS. which, since the Pre doesn't have to be hacked to run unsigned code, will probably be quite a lot.
How long until the mobile phone network operators in the United States lock down execution of homemade apps as a condition of carrying the phone?
So a market is "free" so long as the monopolies aren't "governmental".
A monopoly is "governmental" if the monopolist uses the power of the state to maintain it, even if the monopolist is a business in the private sector. The DMCA anti-circumvention powers, like the other powers granted to copyright owners, are a government-granted monopoly. What monopolistic business methods were you thinking of that don't involve the power of the state?
IS NOT A FUCKING WORD.
>> palm's technical support
>> I just threw away my T2 and got a touch, and love it
Out of fire, and into the frying pan? I am sure you are loving it.
and that's because iphone fanbois were still pondering over a possible comeback.
itunes... meh...
Except your COULD write user mode USB drivers for Windows.
... aren't they? Not really.
In fact, these - non-iPod - devices seem to have been out of production for nearly a decade now.
I seem to recall that some of the mentioned players were current (and indeed, supported by iTunes 1.2 or so) in the days of Mac OS 9, circa 1999 or 2000, like the Nomad series by Creative and the Rio series by sonicBlue.
I'm all in favor of content unlocking. Companies should compete on better ways to handle the content. But the content itself, should be: unlocked, unDRMed and free as in speech, and as in beer.
I decided to never use Palm again once they decided to stop supporting the Treo 600 on OS X -- things eventually just stopped working as Apple updated their system and Palm didn't bother to keep up. Why risk buying a Pre when I think the support for the iPhone will be more reliable?
I just threw away my T2...
I would have loved to have it.
I am sure you are loving it.
Actually I loved it so much (my 16) that I just replaced it with a new 32gb. Syncing that works, doesn't breed duplicate records in my addressbook constantly, contact pictures, can access my notes via www on any computer, can play my music and view my photos, free ssh and vnc clients, it just goes on and on, heck I don't even use 1/2 of the features and it just blows palmos out of the water at every single turn.
Not to mention the stylus targeting on my T2 has been shifted 1/4" up for the last year and nobody has a fix. (it refused to recalibrate)
Perhaps the biggest fear I have with palmos is when someone approaches me and asks for help with their palm. The usual story is it just stopped syncing a year ago for no reason. (this means their palm has a ton of new information entered on it that does not exist on their computer) Of course to help with this courts disaster because sometimes it will sync from palm to computer, sometimes it will sync from computer to palm, deleting whatever's there, and sometimes it will just resync everything and things start doubling. Or occasionally it will nuke an entire thing, on the palm AND the computer. The inability to back up anything on the PP before trying to fix the syncing makes my stomach turn. "OK, we get ONE shot at this. if it goes bad, you're going to lose everything on the palm. All we can do is back up your computer and restore the data if the palm nukes it all." What do you say to that?
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
It has been possible to sync non-Apple devices with iTunes for non-DRM content for a long time, at least on the Mac side. Some devices have done it without extra software, hooking into iTunes' USB handling directly, others have used intermediary software. The former *sounds* nice, but when a device does more than play media and keep very simplified PIM info, iTunes isn't going to meet its users' needs. So then the vendor needs to write their own tools anyway, and it stops making much sense to have the device talk to iTunes directly, since the iTunes library information and media files are usable without iTunes and the PIM data that iTunes can sync is all accessible via SyncServices. That obviously differs on Windows, but surely it must have some sort of open-access PIM data sync system... (never touch the thing myself...) The only thing Palm seems to be doing that is really different is that apparently they've decided to go the route of mimicking an iPod: sending Apple's USB Vendor and Product ID's so that iTunes will think the Pre is an iPod. Not Wise.
Does a red story mean that there are no comments?
Not sure, but a read story means it's winter in hell.
What exactly is the threat to Apple? It works with iTunes? So? I used to own a TDK MP3 player that also worked with iTunes. People forget that iTunes predates the iPod.
Some people never use iTunes to buy anything, but once you have iTunes it is hard to resist visiting the iTunes Music Store. Remember, Apple is getting rid of DRM in the ITMS, and music purchased there now "plays for sure" on any device. This is much more of a middle finger to the RIAA. Keep in mind that the recording industry is looking to reduce Apple's control and influence, not increase it.
If Apple allows Palm, iRiver and other device manufacturers to use iTunes, it gains access to potential music sales that previously would not have been Apple's. When it comes to personal listening devices, either you iPod or you don't. But - if you own an MP3 player and you buy music instead of downloading it on P2P networks, I am sure Apple would love to have your business.
Next, consider the potential market for sales to owners of smartphones, and Apple can broaden their potential market tenfold without lifting a finger. If Palm allows the Pre to utilize iTunes without prompting or overt permission from Apple, the FTC cannot really take action against Apple for restraint of trade, monopoly practices, etc etc etc.
Finally, iTunes exposes the user to the Mac user interface, even when running on Windows. Users may also see Apple product features "dimmed" in buttons and menus when their non-Apple product is connected. Apple could even detect that a non-Apple product is connected to their iTunes software and display marketing that targets sales to users of their competitors' products. Can you say "halo effect"?
"I've got you this time, Brer Rabbit," said Brer Fox, jumping up and shaking off the dust. "You've sassed me for the very last time. Now I wonder what I should do with you?"
Brer Rabbit's eyes got very large. "Oh please Brer Fox, whatever you do, please don't throw me into the briar patch."
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