Early last week Apple rolled out iTunes 8.2.1, a sneaky little update with a hidden agenda -- to kill the Palm Pre's syncing with Apple's iTunes software.  As the owner of the majority of the MP3 player market, Apple's iPods can only officially sync with iTunes.  This means that most users, for better or worse, use iTunes and have all their music preloaded into it.  Thus it was an attractive feature for the Pre automatically sync with iTunes, with no messy importing or folder-searching necessary.

Apple managed to block that feature for a bit, but not for long.  Palm has now released webOS 1.1.0, an update to the Palm Pre's operating system.  The update does many nice things; among them it unblocks iTunes and restores syncing.  Palm innocently describes the one-up stating that the update "resolves an issue preventing media sync from working with latest version of iTunes (8.2.1)."

Other improvements include proper deletion of emails via push, smoother list scrolling, new drop-down animations, corrected folders within IMAP Gmail accounts, and faster application load times.  The other big improvements are the addition of emoticons and Microsoft Exchange.  Palm also has released its 31st application for the phone -- NFL Mobile Live for watching games and audio from the device.

It seems a natural question to ask how long it will take before Apple releases iTunes 8.2.2 and tries to lock out the Pre once more.  However, as the latest update goes to show for all the embarrassment that its anticompetitive tactics bring, locking the Pre out of iTunes may be a losing battle.