Music Ally

Interactive radio service Pandora has revealed as part of an article in GigaOm that snowballing mobile uptake has driven the brand’s impressive growth of late. Pandora has been installed on 13 million smartphones to date including iPhone, Blackberry, Palm and Android. 9 million of those users didn’t previously have computer-based Pandora accounts, meaning that 24% of Pandora’s users came from mobile. A quarter of the music played on Pandora goes to mobile and 25% of the purchases via iTunes or Amazon happen through mobile.

The ongoing saga over whether Palm’s Pre smartphone can or can’t synchronise with iTunes has another chapter, with Palm having restored the feature in the new release of its webOS smartphone software. Apple has blocked the feature twice now in iTunes updates, with Palm finding a workaround each time. We sense if neither side gives up, this could be heading to the courts.

One of the more curious features of Palm’s new Pre smartphone is its ability to sync with users’ iTunes libraries by pretending to be an iPod. However, Apple has just updated its support website with a slightly menacing-sounding article:

“Apple is aware that some third-parties claim that their digital media players are able to sync with Apple software. However, Apple does not provide support for, or test for compatibility with, non-Apple digital media players and, because software changes over time, newer versions of Apple’s iTunes software may no longer provide syncing functionality with non-Apple digital media players.”

In other words, once the next iTunes update is released, Pre owners shouldn’t count on their synching still working…