Butterscotch Tutorial
Palm Pre Basics -- part five of twelve: Charging and syncing the Pre
Jay Goldman: I'm Jay Goldman, the host of Mr. Mobile. Today, we're going to take a look at the syncing and charging your new Palm Pre.
The Pre comes with a travel charger that can be plug into the wall for charging purposes only. The charger uses a standard USB port and Palm has helpfully included cables that have a shiny spot on them that matches the shiny spot on the charger. So always shiny to shiny and you don't have any trouble plugging things in. same as true for the other end that plugs in to the Pre which also has a shiny spot on it, so, you know, which way is up.
Plugging the end of the USB cable into a laptop allows you to sync the Pre as well as charging it. Use the micro USB port located on the side of the Pre, underneath the panel, shiny side up and the Pre will automatically go into sync mode. You have the choice of three different things to do when you plug into Pre. Media Sync allows you t sync the files that are on the Pre with iTunes on your Mac or PC. USB Drive uses the Pre as a USB Drive on the computer which allows you access to the files that are Pre including photos, video, wallpapers and just general storage and the Just Charge option just charges the Pre.
Tapping on Media Sync will show a syncing icon on the Pre and will mounted in iTunes as in iPod. A note on syncing with iTunes, Apple doesn't support syncing non Apple device. So Pre has to do a number of different hats to get the device working in iTunes itself. As a result when Apple releases updates for iTunes it often stops the Pre from syncing.
If you're a Pre user and you use iTunes to sync your media, you may want to stay one revision back when Apple releases new versions so that Palm has a chance to catch-up and re-enable syncing in the Pre.
Second note on syncing with iTunes because it ceases as an iPod and offers to sync contacts and calendars, you may think that would actually sync with the Pre. Unfortunately, the Pre doesn't support them and so you're essentially using it as a backup for that information rather than being able to access them. If you'd like to sync those with your Mac or PC, the best option is to sync the Mac with Google and then use the Pre's built-in support to sync that information down. You want to take a look at an application like Spanning Sync on a Mac or a number of different Google Sync options of Windows to allow you to do that.
Take a look at the rest of our series for information on the Pre. Thanks for watching.
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