Thursday, August 20, 2009
Apple CEO to Palm: I’ll Quit Sniffing Your Org Chart if You Quit Sniffing Mine
Apple appears to have a particular affinity for the unwritten no-poaching agreements said to be so popular among the nation’s biggest tech companies. Earlier this summer, the New York Times reported that Apple may have quietly negotiated an agreement with Google not to hire away each other’s top talent. Now, Bloomberg claims that the company attempted to win a similar commitment from Palm, but was rebuffed.
Palm has added another Apple alum to its employee roster. Jeff Zwerner, who did stints at Apple as both senior art director and creative director for packaging, has signed on at Palm as senior vice president of brand design.
Devices “falsely pretending to be iPods” can once again sync with iTunes, whether Apple likes it or not. Palm this evening released an update to the Pre’s webOS operating system that restores the iTunes syncing ability that its Cupertino rival disabled only last week. 
Palm’s Pre is the first non-Apple device to successfully link with iTunes in years. And it may also be the last. On Tuesday, Apple issued an advisory warning that it does not support iTunes integration with third-party digital media players.
The Palm Pre officially went on sale this morning, and judging from initial reports–and my experience at a local northern California Sprint store–neither demand or supply was particularly overwhelming. Certainly, lines for the device were far shorter than those that extended from Apple stores for the launches of the iPhone and the iPhone 3G. Arriving outside my local Sprint store about an hour after they first opened, I found not a queue of eager Pre-buyers, but two kids making forts out of a few Pre shipping boxes left outside the store.
June 8. That’s the day Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference kicks off and the day the company is expected to uncrate its next-generation iPhone. Could it also be the day after Palm rolls out its new Pre handset? The latest rumors suggest it is, positing June 7 as one of the release windows for the Pre and noting that the company is casting a viral video campaign slated to run through that month as well. It’s an intriguing thought, but would Palm really do such a thing?
