Over the past couple of weeks, we have seen several skirmishes in the war between Palm and Apple.

First off, Apple stopped the Palm Pre smartphone from syncing with iTunes. Apple released the iTunes 8.2.1 update, which “addressed an issue with verification of Apple devices. One of the much-touted features of the Palm Pre is the ability to sync directly with iTunes. Palm’s team of engineers (mostly Apple / iPod alumnis) somehow managed to make the Pre appear as an iPod to iTunes. I guess this is the start of a cat-and-mouse game between these two rival companies.

Last week, Palm made their Mojo Software Development Kit available to all interested app developers. Previously opened only to a select few, now all developers can make use of Mojo. Palm has made a good start with 1.8 million apps downloaded from their App Catalog, and hopefully soon there will be more applications available.

Of course, 1.8 million apps is next to nothing compared to 1.5 billion apps downloaded from the Apple App Store, or 8 billion songs from the iTunes Store. Palm has a long way to go to catch up. Apple surprised just about everyone with very good second quarter results. Apple sold 2.6 million computers, 10.2 million iPods, and 5.2 million iPhones. Yes, the company formerly known as Apple Computer Inc sold twice as many phones and 4 times as many portable music players compared to computers.

Final shot for this round : Palm has released version 1.1 of the webOS for the Pre. This large update (84MB) offers some bug fixes, better support for enterprise, new features (e.g. the ability to set reminders based on people) and most importantly, it allows Palm Pre owners to again sync with iTunes.

The battle continues…

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Filed under: Mobile News

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