How To Sync Your Treo With iTunes

As the pre-iPhone freakout continues, everyone should just take a deep breath and remember that there are plenty of phones out there that can already do many of the things the iPhone will do.

Treo owners can use a great application called mOcean to sync a treo with iTunes in a few steps. mOcean installs on the Treo the way all apps should install on a smartphone, by dialing the phone number and using the Treo’s internet connection to download and install directly to the device bypassing that annoying step of having to install apps through the Palm interface.

Once installed, mOcean might make you laugh when you see how much the interface mimics the iPod. The Treo screen becomes a virtual replica of the iPod interface including the same screen menus for playlists and a digital click wheel.

In order to sync your Treo with iTunes, you need to download one remaining part of mOcean to your Mac, mOceanSync. Once mOceanSync is running on your Mac, you can select any of the playlist in your iTunes library to sync. You cannot sync DRM media to your Treo, that violates the “play only on an iPod” rule of the iTunes DRM mandate. You can however sync your entire ripped library of tunes or other music that is not DRM’d.

To sync the Treo with iTunes, you connect your Treo via USB and navigate to the “Sync With iTunes” option and that’s all there is to it. The syncing process is not nearly as fast as syncing iTunes with an iPod, but what do you want?

Biggest bummer of mOcean? It costs money, $29.99 to sync your Treo with iTunes easily. Is it worth it? The app works, there is no doubt about that. It does exactly what it says it is supposed to do. But for $29.99, you’re only $50.00 shy of a cool new iPod shuffle.

If you are thinking of syncing iTunes to your Treo, you also have to buy headphones because the Treo does not ship with headphones. Add at least $10.00 for a crappy pair of headphones that will never stay in your ears as well as the iPod earphones. Your Treo headphone jack is also going to require an adapter to bump up to the 1/4″ standard headphone jack. Throw in $5.00 for the adapter jack and you are up to about $45.00 to get your Treo ready and you won’t be able to play your entire iTunes library because of DRM.

Total price to get your Treo ready to sync to iTunes: $45.00 (at least)
Total price of a new, shiny, colorful Apple 1 GB iPod Shuffle Metal (2nd Generation): $79.00

mOcean is a great app and I’ve left alot of the things it can supposedly do like play videos and show photos, but if you are only going through the effort to sync your Treo to iTunes, spend the extra thirty bucks and get the shuffle.