It is pro game.
It is just like some of the smack talking that happens in pro football, basketball games. If you talk smack and that takes the other player off his game and you score... that is part of the game.
If the work arounds cost palm $500 to do and are legal. And they cost Apple $3000 to do and they can't really stop them. If that $3,000 of Apple isn't spent on a feature that really would be hard for Palm to compete against then Palm made progress.
Frankly there is also the fanatical Apple fan boy blow back here also. If it is a no harm, no foul interoperability feature then the Apple-can-do-no-wrong folks are arguing all over all the boards about how Apple is so justified in denying end user functionality.
It is a small hack.
If no one is calling Apple support about Pre synching then it is almost as anal retentive on Apples part as it is on Palm.
If it costs Palm more money that it does Apple then it is a small but too expensive hack. In that case it is dumb for Palm.
Finally it also points out that the sync process really isn't all that proprietary. There is probably a very simple protocol that would allow iTunes (or any other music library software) to sync with any other device on the other end of a usb connection.
An analogy would be like you needed the Microsoft IIS server to talk to IE but wouldn't talk to Firefox or Sarfari. Seriously what is so complicated here. It is a list of files and if not there copy. Before there was DRM stuff to worry about. ( didn't make sense to copy files that wouldn't run a non apple MP3 player. ) If the files run anywhere now .... what is the point of being anal retentive about which device transfer the file to?
The iPod sync protocol for iTunes isn't a publicly documented protocol. That means if Apple discovers the need to alter the protocol (to handle a new feature or fix a bug, for example) they don't need to tell anyone else what's going on. By piggy-backing on this, Palm has set themselves up for having to reverse engineer any changes Apple makes to the protocol in order to maintain compatibility. What are they going to do if, at some point, Apple decides that encrypting the transfer protocol is a sensible thing to do? (Say for example, allowing over-the-air syncing, and just using the same protocol over the wire for the sake of consistency and simplicity.) Palm has put themselves in a situation where they might be *unable* to provide syncing to their own device for a period of time because they didn't want to bother doing it the correct way in the first place.
The public interface for third-party devices is designed to be stable and maintain compatibility across releases. It's a bundle of XML which describes the iTunes Library's structure. All Palm has to do is write an app which interfaces with iTunes through this *public*, documented interface, and they can handle syncing however they need to for their device.
What's worse, based on a basic descriptions I've seen of the method Apple used to block the initial piggy-back ride (check for an Apple USB manufacturer ID as well as an iPod USB device ID), this could mean that iTunes (and OS X) are now incapable of distinguishing a Pre from an iPod. What happens now when Apple releases a firmware update for the iPod model in question? Will it try to overwrite the Pre's firmware? What happens if it tries? What happens if it 'kinda' succeeds? Who is responsible for the damage caused? I'd say Palm would actually be the responsible party, but the backlash from the *user* would be targeted at Apple, because it was Apple's software that caused their phone to die.
Also, by going this piggy-back route, Palm is violating their contract with the USB Consortium (the group which managed, allocates, and maintains the list of USB manufacturer/device IDs which allow computers to determine what device has just been plugged in). In doing so, they've opened themselves up to the potential *loss* of their USB IDs. ALL OF THEM.
In short, there's a multitude of reasons why Palm's insistance on pretending the Pre is an iPod is a *stupid* decision.
