I vaguely recall a quote from Henry Ford saying that customers could purchase a model t Ford in any color they wanted as long as it was Black.  That is apparently the approach that Palm has taken with the Pre on many areas, especially on the music manager.  You can use any music manager you like, but the Pre will only work with itunes.

That’s just fantastic if you already use itunes, like itunes, want to keep using itunes etc.

If you manage your music in Windows Media Player, Real, Winamp or just play music from folders on your hard drive or something, well then you are kind of stuck with Model T coloring.

Personally, I use Windows Media Player.  Is it better than itunes, is it superior to Winamp?

No idea and I don’t care.  I use it, because that is what I use, have used, and what I have thousands and thousands and thousands of songs organized within.  So to have to switch to itunes, basically means that ALL of my songs are now lost and disorganized in itunes and I have to start from scratch.

Not cool, but as an early adopter of a new device, I realize that the customer is not always right.  Don’t get me wrong, I’d be just as un-right if I were trying to use an iphone, but that’s kind of expected from Apple, because they are the screwy fools that made itunes!  Palm’s been working with other music players for years and years and doing it pretty damn well from my past experiences with treos, handsprings, palms etc.

I guess, I’m currently hoping that some non-Apple fan boy at Palm stands up and says, “hey some of our customers don’t love Apple just because, maybe we should give them some music player options on the Pre, after all we are trying to save our company with this phone, no point in alienating Windows Media Player users.”

Oh, and while you’re at it, don’t forget to fast track that Audible project.

I still really like the Palm Pre, but after my first Palm Pre died the yesterday, and Palm sent me on a 150 minute wild goose chase through technical support, I guess you could say the honeymoon period is over.  Oh, and if you are wondering what all those crazy stupid ‘itunes’ hyperlinks are for, you can find the same links by doing a google search with the keywords ‘itunes sucks’. 

Note. I’m a blogger, not a journalist.  I’m purposefully subjective, and prefer to look at the applied uses of gadgets and software in specific unique circumstances, and at extreme tolerances.  If you are looking for a generic ‘review’ of something, you have mistakenly come to the wrong place.  We don’t sell black model t cars here, we offer chartreuse model t’s with glitter pain jobs, flames on the hood, and well, that analogy is a little tired, but we don’t do generic reviews here.  If you want generic and objective, go over to Cnet and read a paragraph with a lot of verbage that you probably could have found in a Palm press release.

After I have had some more hands on with the actual player on the Pre, I’ll cover that again soon.  At first glance, the sound (and the headphones that come with the Pre) are excellent.  I would like to see software improvements in the following:

• the ability to adjust volume on the touch screen
• the ability to delete a song from the device (haven’t found this yet, if it exists, then it needs to be added as an option in more spots
• the ability to convert part of a song into a ring tone.  The G1 (android) from T-Mobile has this capability and it was excellent, a little music editor that you could select part or all of a song and set it as a ringtone or notification.  The ringtones that come standard with the Pre are about as diverse as a gaggle of Canadian Geese
• the ability to drag and drop songs up and down within the play list as the songs are playing (mixing on the fly)
• The ability to rate songs with stars on a 1 to 5 rating level and then later play songs by rating level, and better yet, have it update my computer files
• push button notification to update my facebook letting people know what song I’m listening to & maybe it includes a YouTube link if it can find one, or an Amazon MP3 sales link on my Amazon Associates account so I can make a fortune of my friends. 

But like I said, haven’t had a chance to think about this much yet . . .

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