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.

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.

[ Source Wired ]