Palm tweaks its software so Pre can use iTunes

July 25, 2009|Associated Press

SAN FRANCISCO - Palm’s Pre smartphone just can’t stay away from Apple’s iTunes software.

Palm Inc. says the Pre can again connect to iTunes, only a week after Apple Inc. shut it out. A software update delivered automatically to the phones reenables transfer of music, photos, and video from iTunes to Pre phones, according to a Palm blog post late Thursday.

The $200 Pre launched in early June as a competitor to Apple Inc.’s iPhone and became the first non-Apple device that could connect directly to iTunes. Apple crippled that function with an iTunes update last week, saying that Pre phones were “falsely pretending to be iPods.’’

Palm’s latest workaround is similar to the original trick it performed. When a Pre is connected to a computer through a USB port, the device gives out a hardware vendor code that Apple has been assigned by an industry standards group, the USB Implementers Forum. ITunes then recognizes the Pre as an Apple device and allows users to transfer content to it.