One feature touted as selling point for Palm Pre smartphone is its ability to sync music with the ubiquitous iTunes on the desktop. This feature is not supported by Apple and is considered hack by many, a hack not by any individual hacker but by a corporation. Palm is able to achieve such feat as engineers for Palm Pre used to work for Apple.

Apple released a minor update to iTunes 8.2.1 last week, the release notes is vague about what minor patches have been applied. But Palm Pre users realized that the sync with iTunes is broken with the latest iTunes release.

Palm released its latest webOS 1.1 for the Palm Pre device on Thursday, and specifically highlighted in its official blog post that iTunes sync is back for Palm Pre with this release of webOS.

Oh, and one more thing: Palm webOS 1.1 re-enables Palm media sync. That’s right — you once again can have seamless access to your music, photos and videos from the current version of iTunes (8.2.1).

So what’s your next move Apple?

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Apple’s App Store pioneered the managed mobile application marketplace, even though Apple is one of the last major players to enter the smartphone race. App Store has so far surpassed expectation with its billion downloads recently and is one of the major differentiating feature of iPhone compared with other smartphone platform.

The overwhelming success of App Store spurs other vendors to develop their own store in order to compete. In case you are confused by the different naming for app stores, here is the list of Apple App Store’s competitors:

App World

BlackBerry launched App World in Apr. Visit the store.

Android Market

Android Market for Google Android based phones was launched in Oct 2008, with the availability of paid apps from Feb this year for US market.

App Catalog

This could be the name for Palm’s app store for its webOS devices, nothing is confirmed until Palm Pre’s official debut, which should be anytime now. But there is no indication if Palm’s app store will be available together with the launch of the first webOS phone.

Ovi Store

Nokia’s Ovi branding is more than just a store, the Ovi website encompasses other phone services such as contacts and calendar sync to the internet cloud, similar to what is being offered in MobileMe and Microsoft’s MyPhone.

Nokia on Monday began rolling out its Ovi Store to production servers, and is live today worldwide for Nokia phone owners. TechCrunch took a spin and called the launch a complete disaster.

Windows Marketplace for Mobile

Microsoft has yet to launch its Windows Marketplace for Mobile app store for Windows Mobile platform, but you can’t help but notice the store has the longest name among all the app stores, just like most of other Microsoft products. We suspect the branding is from the same marketing team behind Windows Vista.

Too many app stores for our money indeed. Will there be app store from Sony Ericsson or even Motorola?

Updated June 03, 2009 – Sony Ericsson announced their PlayNow Arena app store

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Looking at the bright side, the new webOS from Palm is generating excitement and hype ever since it was demonstrated on a brand new Palm Pre smartphone at CES in January. Many has called it the closest challenge to Apple iPhone based on the slickness and usability of the webOS.

Palm Pre will also be the first smartphone other than iPhone to feature multitouch capability. Colligan reiterated that Palm is not too concerned about any potential litigation from Apple. Apple was awarded recently for patents covering touch screen and multi-touch user interface. He mentioned that Pre will have an app store and Palm will not control its content like in Apple’s App Store.

Palm Pre is rumored to launch anytime now, starting with Sprint. It will expand to other US carriers in 2010. International launch is also expected. Latest leak specs indicate that it will have MMS and support data tethering (phone-as-modem) via bluetooth or USB. These two are features lacking in iPhone.

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