The Angry Drunk

There has always been a hint of men­tal ill­ness at Palm. From their habit of break­ing third party appli­ca­tion com­pat­i­bil­ity with each hard­ware release, to treat­ing expand­able stor­age in such an incom­pre­hen­si­ble way that I don’t think that any­one ever really fig­ured out how it worked, to the bizarre chain of buy – outs, merg­ers and acqui­si­tions that make Palm’s own­er­ship his­tory look more com­pli­cated than the Habsburg fam­ily tree; it’s always been appar­ent to out­side observers that there has to be some­thing in the water over at Palm HQ. But none of Palm’s pre­vi­ous shenani­gans holds a can­dle to the cur­rent whacky antics that they are dis­play­ing over the Palm Pre and its Media Sync functionality.

For the unin­formed: when Palm first announced the Pre, one of its highly pro­moted fea­tures was Media Sync. Which pro­vided the abil­ity for the Pre to appear as an iPod with Apple’s iTunes soft­ware. Before the first units shipped there was wild spec­u­la­tion regard­ing this fea­ture. Was Palm work­ing with Apple to enable this? If not, how would Apple respond?

As it turns out, Apple wasn’t work­ing with Palm on the Media Sync fea­ture. What was hap­pen­ing was that Palm was uti­liz­ing a

Continue read­ing Palm: Insane, or Batshit Insane?