The phones are useful when not connected because you have stored your important data on the device. Because cell phone coverage and WIFI are not ubiquitous, a phone connected to the cloud is essentially useless in the absence of a signal. I have visited places all over this country where a flare gun would have been more a effective means of communication than my smartphone, but I could still call up that important office document, pdf or diagram because it was stored locally on the device. Less secure, probably. More convenient, absolutely.....

Palm is wrong here, Apple is primarily a hardware company and uses iTunes, the App Store and OSX in order to increase their hardware sales. Allowing Palm to hack together support for iTunes in a competing product jeopardizes Apple's business model, they are right to fight back. THEN Palm goes and advertises iTunes support as a key feature of their competing device when it's nothing more than a hack talk about biting that hand that unwillingly feeds you.

Palm could have licensed support for iTunes from Apple and avoided this all together, but this is probably an indicator of where they are as a viable company right now. They have 1 relevant product and are exclusive on a carrier that runs a very distant 3rd as far as subscriber base. WebOS is very nice, but that IP just solidifies them as a prime target for takeover, they will not beat Apple at this game........