According to Fortune’s respectable Apple 2.0 blog, the Palm Pre has a rather sneaky trick up its sleeve. First, a reminder of the main reason for the iPod’s original success: iTunes. The “vertical integration” of iTunes (for organization) and the iPod (for playback) was a killer combo.

In order to work as well, the Pre needs something like iTunes. So what about iTunes itself? That’s the Pre’s trick — it will sync with Apple’s own software. Fortune:

Plug a Pre into a Mac and it syncs, seamlessly, with Apple’s (AAPL) iTunes.

It won’t pick up iPhone applications, of course, or older, Fairplay DRM’ed music, but everything else should just work. The Pre team is full of ex-Apple engineers, so they should certainly know the strings that need to be pulled inside iTunes to get this working.

It does it by faking out iTunes, making the jukebox software think that it is connected to a real iPod. Hook it up and you’ll be given three options: USB mass storage device, charging only or iTunes sync.

This is a ballsy move from Palm, and we totally love it: a big fat middle finger at Apple. Apple will, we are sure, be readying its legal attack dogs as I write, and don’t be at all surprised if an iTunes update pops up around June 6th. This fight just got a lot more interesting.

UPDATE: Here's the official line from Palm:

Palm media sync is a feature of webOS that synchronizes seamlessly with iTunes, giving you a simple and easy way to transfer DRM-free music, photos and videos to your Palm Pre.(2) Simply connect Pre to your PC or Mac via the USB cable, select "media sync" on the phone, and iTunes will launch on your computer desktop. You can then choose which DRM-free media files to transfer.

Scooplet: the Palm Pre syncs with iTunes [Fortune Apple2.0]

Photoshop job: Charlie Sorrel