Palm Pre Takes a Holiday – A Real Review
You may recall Palm's Real Reviewer program, wherein Palm awarded a handful of Palm Pre phones to lucky winners who, in turn, are blogging, twittering, and posting about their month with the Pre. Below, one lucky winner RizP of our forums, talks about how the Palm Pre made his vacation a whole lot more fun. Don't miss RizP's first Real Review, posted here in our forums. Read on!
After having the Pre for several weeks now, I wanted to share my thoughts on what I think is one of the hardest real-world tests you can throw at any mobile device: The vacation.
If you think about it, vacations are the perfect high intensity test for your mobile tech. When you're out for a bit of R&R, frustration shouldn't be on the itinerary. In other words, stuff just has to work. In the last few weeks I've had the opportunity to take my Pre a couple short trips, and I came away pretty impressed.
How Palm Re-Enabled iTunes Sync (The Plot Thickens)
So the big question: How did Palm re-enable iTunes sync? The answer, so far as we can tell, is to go even deeper in their efforts to make the Pre look like an iPod. I just plugged my 1.1 Pre into my Mac in Media Sync mode and sure enough, it's identifying itself with an Apple USB Vendor ID:
Product ID: 0x8002
Vendor ID: 0x05ac (Apple Inc.)
Version: 0.16
Manufacturer: Palm Inc.
Jeffgus in our forums confirms the same: The Pre is now telling your computer that the vendor who made it is Apple. The change here is that with previous versions of webOS, the Vendor ID was "0x0830 (Palm Inc.)." So while previously the Pre identified itself as a "mass storage device" called an iPod, now it's identifying itself as a "mass storage device manufactured by Apple" called an iPod.
The plot has thickened, though - read on to see more about Palm calling foul to the USB authorities.
