A little birdie provided me with the following: Palm Pre Video

As I speculated in my previous blog post on Palm Pre Sync and now confirmed by the image above, when the Pre is in “Media Sync” mode it identifies itself as an Apple iPod. However, it’s only the Mass Storage interface that identifies itself as an iPod. The root USB node (IOUSBDevice) still identifies the device as a Palm Pre (not visible in the image above). This means that Apple can very easily update iTunes to block the Pre.

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Update: that the Pre still works with the new iTunes 8.2 release is not surprising and doesn’t mean much. The news about the Pre’s iTunes support came out on Friday. iTunes 8.2 was released on Monday. Software has release cycles that include QA. There’s simply no way Apple could have made changes to how iTunes identifies an iPod and passed the new build through QA in such a short amount of time.