Comments on: Is the Palm Pre Syncing with iTunes by Pretending to be an iPod?

By: marco

marco — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 02:30:37 +0000

i have the pre. its awesome. so shut up

By: oneAwake

oneAwake — Sun, 31 May 2009 00:20:39 +0000

@The Reptile

That is hardly a review, if you had read through the comments you would have learned the unit BGR has is not a final version, hence the reason some features do not work, that device is not even active on the network, and the keyboard on that unit is different than the final version. Actually, the unit BGR has was not sent by Sprint or Palm. Many who have been working with the Pre over the last several months have said that unit is a prototype from February of this year. What could one expect form an Apple friendly reviewer?

By: Timmy

Timmy — Sat, 30 May 2009 15:05:07 +0000

RIM distributes an app called Media Sync that lets you sync your Blackberry with iTunes. This lets me have my music on both my iPhone and Blackberry. Its been out for more than a year and Apple doesn’t seem to have a problem with it.

By: Anthony

Anthony — Sat, 30 May 2009 10:53:30 +0000

if i get the correctly, the Pre is showing up as an iPod. This sounds to me like they’re using their knowledge of what they did at Apple to get the Pre to do this. Isn’t that using Apples IP? And doesn’t that mean Apple has a right to make then stop?

By: icebike

icebike — Sat, 30 May 2009 08:04:59 +0000

@Lycestra:

404

The blog software breaks links that contain a lot of underscore characters.

Use tinyurl.com to make a portable link.

By: anonymous

anonymous — Sat, 30 May 2009 06:39:46 +0000

Palm knows that Apple is infringing on many of their basic mobility patents. So Palm can be daring

By: Lycestra

Lycestra — Sat, 30 May 2009 00:40:49 +0000

This is clearly a hypothesis, and I find it ridiculous. Unless Apple has closed down the iTunes ecosystem from allowing hardware plugins, there's no reason for silly tricks. It won't be able to play FairPlay DRM'ed content from the iTunes store, but anything else that can play on a device should be transferrable with a proper plugin.

This reminded me of a past issue people had with iTunes before network sharing was built in. A third party made a free plugin that let you share music between machines over network. Apple released the SDK to allow for adding direct hardware support, not for network or otherwise, and shut down the third party plugin. That said, the Pre is hardware, and is precisely what the SDK is for. And since then, Apple has expanded their sync services, which is also free game for any developer to add support for additional destinations. MySync, which I beleive works like MobileMe between desktops, but syncs locally over a network, rather than to a cloud and back. Just to name one.

ref on the network sharing via a plugin using the SDK intended only for hardware support: http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/AppleExcommunicatesiCommuneiTunesFileSwappingPlug-InViolatesSDK_Ter/

Nothing to see here.

By: The Reptile

The Reptile — Fri, 29 May 2009 20:38:51 +0000

A little off topic, but BGR’s review of the Pre is less than stellar. The Good: WebOS, The Not so Good: Build Quality, The Possibly Overhyped: Synergy. Time will tell – we’re just over a week away from reality.

http://www.boygeniusreport.com/2009/05/29/palm-pre-review/

By: icebike

icebike — Fri, 29 May 2009 19:37:17 +0000

http://tinyurl.com/lrqr2d (Above link broken by the handling of underscores in the Blog software – sorry).

By: icebike

icebike — Fri, 29 May 2009 19:32:42 +0000

@Rene:

I can’t speak for Canada, but in the US it is not illegal to make a device that interacts with software as long as you do not use the software’s internal code.

Anything exposed over the wire is fair game. Without this, there would be no interoperability of common devices. There would be no point in even making standards such as USB or Firewire or SATA, because it would be illegal to use them.

Reverse engineering for interoperability is legal.

Pystar is NOT a good analogy. They were using Apple’s OS in THEIR machines, by faking an Apple locking device.

As for the margin on iTunes sales, its plenty profitable all by itself, estimates one year ago ranging as high as 360 million pure profit per year. It stands by itself, and does not require sales of additional hardware to prop it up. http://www.coolfer.com/blog/archives/2008/03/howmuchprofit.php