Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on May 13, 2008 by CyberNet.

Rumor had it that HBO shows would be appearing at the iTunes store soon. This was yesterday and now today, sure enough, HBO has made it’s grand entrance. The official Press Release from Apple explains that programs like The Sopranos, Sex and the City, Deadwood, and Rome, Flight of the Conchords and The Wire. The interesting part about this whole thing is that Apple must have decided to ease up on their price restrictions because different HBO shows cost different prices.

Typically shows are priced at $1.99 per episode, but certain HBO shows are priced at $2.99 per episode.

• The Sopranos – $2.99
• Deadwood – $2.99
• Rome – $2.99
• The Wire – $1.99
• Sex and The City – $1.99
• Flight of the Conchords – $1.99

Now it leaves us wondering what other HBO shows will be added to the list and if other television networks will be interested in putting their shows on iTunes knowing they may have some flexibility in the pricing?

Thanks for the tip Omar!

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Palm has touted the Pre’s ability to synchronize seamlessly with Apple iTunes. But the latest iTunes 8.2 update raised some doubts as to whether iTunes would still connect flawlessly with the Pre.

Now sources who have tested the Pre with the iTunes 8.2 have confirmed to Wired.com that music syncing still works.

Palm’s new webOS operating system, which powers the Pre, has media sync as one of its key features. With it, users can connect their Pre to a PC or Mac, select ‘media sync’ on the phone and wait for iTunes to launch on their desktop, says Palm.

This effectively makes it as easy to integrate a Pre with iTunes as an iPhone or iPod.

But the feature is dependent to a large extent on Apple’s willingness to play ball. Although iTunes 8.2 doesn’t break the media sync feature, there’s no guarantee that future versions also won’t. After all, what incentive does Apple have to allow easy integration between one of its products and a competing smartphone?

See Also:

• Snap! Palm Pre Will Sync Seamlessly With iTunes
• Side by Side: Palm Pre vs. iPhone 3G

Photo: Maury McCown/Flickr

According to Fortune’s respectable Apple 2.0 blog, the Palm Pre has a rather sneaky trick up its sleeve. First, a reminder of the main reason for the iPod’s original success: iTunes. The “vertical integration” of iTunes (for organization) and the iPod (for playback) was a killer combo.

In order to work as well, the Pre needs something like iTunes. So what about iTunes itself? That’s the Pre’s trick — it will sync with Apple’s own software. Fortune:

Plug a Pre into a Mac and it syncs, seamlessly, with Apple’s (AAPL) iTunes.

It won’t pick up iPhone applications, of course, or older, Fairplay DRM’ed music, but everything else should just work. The Pre team is full of ex-Apple engineers, so they should certainly know the strings that need to be pulled inside iTunes to get this working.

It does it by faking out iTunes, making the jukebox software think that it is connected to a real iPod. Hook it up and you’ll be given three options: USB mass storage device, charging only or iTunes sync.

This is a ballsy move from Palm, and we totally love it: a big fat middle finger at Apple. Apple will, we are sure, be readying its legal attack dogs as I write, and don’t be at all surprised if an iTunes update pops up around June 6th. This fight just got a lot more interesting.

UPDATE: Here’s the official line from Palm:

Palm media sync is a feature of webOS that synchronizes seamlessly with iTunes, giving you a simple and easy way to transfer DRM-free music, photos and videos to your Palm Pre.(2) Simply connect Pre to your PC or Mac via the USB cable, select “media sync” on the phone, and iTunes will launch on your computer desktop. You can then choose which DRM-free media files to transfer.

Scooplet: the Palm Pre syncs with iTunes [Fortune Apple2.0]

Photoshop job: Charlie Sorrel

Nokia’s Ovi store got off to a rocky start Tuesday as users faced problems accessing the store and downloading the programs.

“Shortly after launching the Ovi Store at 2 a.m. ET, we began experiencing extraordinarily high spikes of traffic that resulted in some performance issues for users accessing store.ovi.com and store.ovi.mobi,” said Eric John, head of product marketing for Nokia Ovi in a blog post. “We immediately began to address this issue by adding servers, which resulted in intermittent performance improvements.”

The store features games, applications, podcasts and videos for smartphones running Nokia’s Symbian operating system.

The problems with Ovi’s launch do not bode well for Nokia, which has been struggling to better Apple’s App Store, whose more than 46,000 titles have been downloaded more than 1 billion times since the store’s July 2008 launch. Nokia has lagged other mobile platforms such as Research In Motion’s BlackBerry and Google’s Android OS, both of which launched their own app stores months ago.

The Ovi store can be accessed by about 50 million Nokia device owners worldwide, including the soon-to-be launched N97. The store will have more than 20,000 titles at launch, said Nokia, including both free and paid apps. Customers can visit Ovi through their phone’s browser to personalize and downloads services and programs.

“Ovi is open for business and we’ve stocked the shelves with both local and global content for a broad range of Nokia devices,” said Tero Ojanperä, Executive Vice President, Nokia Services in a statement. “Ovi Store makes shopping for content and applications easy for feature phone and smartphone owners alike.”

But some Nokia fans aren’t pleased. Inability to access the Ovi store on launch isn’t the only trouble that users say they faced. Allaboutsymbian.com, a web site that follows Nokia closely, pointed out that the Ovi store does not offer a clear distinction between Java and native Symbian apps.  The performance of the store client was also slow and the store did not have much content, said the site.

Ovi store users in the U.S. will face additional challenges buying from the Ovi store. U.S. consumers can access and purchase content from the Store via unlocked devices using AT&T or T-Mobile. But those purchases will require a separate credit card transaction. Later this year. AT&T has said it will offer carrier billing, so purchases from the store become a part of the monthly service bills.

Photo: Ovi store rendering on Nokia N97 (dekuwa/Flickr)