Real Squeezes Silently Back into the iPod
News.com reports that Real is once again iPod compatible, whether Apple wants them to be or not. According to RealNetworks Chief Strategy Officer Richard Wolpert, "Harmony now supports all shipping iPods, including iPod Photo." While I still hate Real, I think this is cool.
As News.com notes, "Incompatibility between the major download stores and music players has fragmented the digital market. For example, songs purchased from Apple's iTunes store can only be played directly on Apple's iPod, while songs purchased from Napster or Microsoft cannot be played on the iPod." I think this is becoming a bigger problem, as there are too many proprietary formats and too many different consumer-inconveniencing DRM variants. We need more openness in all this. I want to buy songs off the iTMS and copy them straight over to both my iPod and my PSP. Is that so wrong?
[via Engadget]
