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While Boy Genius may not like the keyboard of the Palm Pre, there is other big news about the soon to be released smartphone that came today.  According to Fortune, the Palm Pre is capable of syncing with iTunes, on a Mac at least.  Looking a reason to dump your iPhone for the Palm Pre?  This might be it.

Fortune is saying that the syncing works seamlessly, just plug the Pre into your Mac and it syncs right up with iTunes.  Previous Palm devices have also done this, but those devices haven’t been around lately.  The Pre obviously won’t be able to work with older FairPlay DRMed songs from iTunes, or any other DRMed files from the iTunes store (video is still DRMed).  However, Apple has switched over to DRM-free for all music in the store, so that may no longer be an issue.  There’s also no word yet on whether podcasts will sync as they do with iPods/iPhones and mark them as being listened to after syncing.  Just having the option to easily move the songs and podcasts to the device using iTunes is nice enough if there are a few rough edges.

It’s hard to imagine Apple taking this very lightly.  While there is third party software to allow some Windows Mobile and Android phones to sync with iTunes, none have had the courage to sync directly with iTunes in quite some time.  Added to the fact that the Pre only seems to sync automatically in Mac OS X, directly within Apple’s closed ecosystem, it might illicit some sort of response.  In the January earnings call COO of Apple Time Cook said Apple will defend it’s intellectual property whenever companies such as Palm rip them off.  It’s not clear if this is an attack of Apple’s intellectual property, but it is clear that Apple probably isn’t all that happy about a competitor’s phone using it’s own biggest draw for those who listen to music on their phones.

Read [Fortune]