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Palm Issues Update and Smacks Back at Apple

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boxingPalm Pre users lost their ‘native’ iTunes syncing ability when Apple, as expected, issued an update to iTunes last week. Now Palm is issuing a counterpunch with a new update that apparently restores the capability. This will probably go several rounds before one or both companies gives up the ghost and things get settled out.

For the life of me, I don’t see why Apple doesn’t just license the use of iTunes and move on. That’s an everybody wins situation, but maybe I’m being naive. But then on the other hand, Palm users have other options of getting their music content on the device, I’m guessing that this tit-for-tat will probably only be a real battle on the corporate level after awhile.

4 Comments

4 Comments

  1. Tony

    07/24/2009 at 7:03 am

    Wow – this is great. I just stuck with an older version of iTunes, but Kudos to Palm :-)!

  2. Sumocat

    07/24/2009 at 8:06 am

    Licensing iTunes defies Apple policy. The same argument’s been made repeatedly for their OS, which the company did license during their desperate, Jobs-free years, and it was quite a pathetic showing. Apple makes their money selling devices, but what sells the devices is the Apple software ecosystem. Opening that would help competitors sell devices, which would not be a win for Apple.

  3. JC

    07/24/2009 at 9:29 am

    In addition to Sumocat’s excellent argument, there is the matter of having a third party dictate features to Apple’s software. As I have said before, perhaps even at this website, in order for Apple to allow Palm Pre to sync with iTunes officially, Apple would have to consume time and effort into make sure that the syncing with Pre always works correctly.

    Palm could change their hardware and Apple would have to support it. Note how there’s a new release of iTunes whenever Apple releases a new iPod or iPhone? They’d have to do that every time Palm releases a new cellphone. Why would Apple want Palm to control their release schedule? (Yes, Palm could test their new cellphone with the existing iTunes. However, if there’s a problem, people will blame Apple, not Palm.)

    Right now, the integration between the hardware and software is tractable because Apple owns both. All that gets much hardware once the hardware manufacturer is a third party. They’d start running into the same sorts of problems Microsoft has. It doesn’t make sense for Apple to open themselves up to these extra complications so that they can improve their competitor’s user experience.

    “Just” licensing the use of iTunes would create a whole bunch of problems. It wouldn’t solve any of them. The right thing to do is for Palm to come up with their own awesome syncing experience that makes Pre owners forget there is such a thing as iTunes.

  4. Ben

    07/24/2009 at 7:35 pm

    haha, they’re like 2 kids.

    @JC i don’t know anything about how itunes works, but instead of apple worrying about supporting all this other hardware, wouldn’t it make more sense for them to simply open up some API and let palm (or others) write their own itunes app for syncing? i think that would put the burden on the 3rd party writer to make sure everything obeys the rules of apple’s API. furthermore, apple could purposefully limit their API so itunes remains more feature rich.

    i don’t see it happening, but this way makes a lot of sense to me if they did.

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