When Palm launched its new pre smartphone earlier this month, one of the phone’s many advertised features is its ability to sync media with Apple’s iTunes software. That’s right: when you pop a pre onto a computer, iTunes seems to magically see (and treat) it like an iPod music player, enabling users to sync music, podcasts, video, and more to the device as if it were one of Apple’s own. The feature raised eyebrows in the technical community, prompting speculation that perhaps former Apple employees (now at Palm) had used proprietary information to set up the syncing capability, or if Palm had independently devised its own clever workaround.
Tag Archive: harmony software
Real Responds To Apple’s ‘Stunned’ Reaction
On Monday, RealNetworks announced a public beta of their Harmony software, a technology that allows consumers to listen to legally downloaded, digitally protected music on 100’s of portable devices, including Apple’s popular iPod. The significance of this announcement is that before Harmony, there was no way of playing, for instance, music downloaded from Real’s Music Store on an iPod.
Apple responded to that news by stating that the company was “stunned that RealNetworks has adopted the tactics and ethics of a hacker to break into the iPod,” and hinted at possible violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

