Well, Palm certainly has some chutzpah. Even after Palm’s complaint with the USB Implementers Forurm resulted in a public lashing, whereby they were chastised for spoofing Apple’s USB vendor ID, they were back to their old tricks this past weekend.
According to PreCentral, when a user hooks up their Pre running WebOS 1.2.1 to their machine, their computer sees the following.
USB Product ID: 0x1209
USB Vendor ID: 0x05ac (Apple, Inc)
Manufacturer: Apple Inc.
So yeah, I guess Palm goes running off and crying to the USB Implementers Forum seeking a certain ruling, and when things don’t go their way, then it’s back to spoofing Vendor Ids like it ain’t no thang.
In light of Palm’s recent actions, many have wondered why Palm is wasting so many resources to fix something that Apple will inevitably break. But according to a PreCentral tipster who accurately predicted that the WebOS 1.2.1 update would restore iTunes syncability, it appears that Palm is hardly expending any resources at all. And I suppose it makes sense – it’s not like Palm engineers need to stay up all night long in order to spoof an USB vendor ID.
Anyways, this tipster writes that it only took Palm developers 5 minutes to restore iTunes syncability for WebOS 1.1 as it only involved a simple change in the Vendor ID. Restoring iTunes sync for WebOS 1.2.1 reportedly took about 2 and a half hours.
So yeah, Palm isn’t breaking the bank or expending any crazy man-hours to work around Apple’s anti-circumvention measures, but you have to wonder just how far Palm is willing to go to keep iTunes syncability alive and well.
October 5th, 2009 at 6:58 am
All Palm is telling their customers is that they don’t have a reliable way to sync music to their device. It could be on one day and off the next. Not the sort of thing your average customer wants to deal with.
October 7th, 2009 at 5:59 pm
Класс! Афтару респект!