For awhile there, it seemed like Palm and Apple would go back and forth, enabling and then disabling direct Pre + iTunes syncing for a good long time. Now, with Palm licking its wounds and PsyStar likely down for the count, Cupertino seems to be running out playmates.

Ma Bell has been getting spanked by Verizon’s highly effective TV advertising campaign and now the courts have, at least for the time being, refused to give the carrier any relief either. But now AT&T has hit back with a TV spot of their own.

Desperate times call for desperate measures, and Ma Bell sure looks desperate now. Their belated response to Verizon’s “there’s a map for that” advertising campaign is wimpy in the extreme as it delivers statistics in textual form only about how complete its 3G + EDGE, which can charitably be referred to as a 2.5G technology, networks are to fill in the gaps.

For the cynical, the obvious conclusion here is that Ma Bell’s marketing team didn’t have anything to counter Verizon with so the company decided to hit back with a legal filing. Although there may be some merit in AT&T’s legal machinations, bringing in the lawyers is a “jump the shark” inflection point in the two companies’ increasingly nasty competition for subscribers.

The same lovely fellow who got himself banned from the iPhone App Store for creating more than 900 mostly useless applications, as well as over 100 complaints from competitors about stolen software code, is back in the news. This time around it’s the feds making the accusations and they’ve filed an indictment accusing Khalid Shaikh of using DOS attacks against a company he once headed.

Palm said, “Tit,” and now Apple’s answered with a cursory “tat.” The ongoing war between the two companies over iTunes syncing rumbles on with neither side apparently willing the concede let alone play nicely with the other.

When WebOS 1.2 arrived without an iTunes 9 sync fix or work around, pretty much everyone assumed Palm had given up their quixotic effort to restore syncing with Apple’s industry leading jukebox software. And, honestly, who could blame them. Well, what a difference a point update can make.

Previously “redacted” documents from Google put the lie to Apple’s assertion that the iPhone maker and App Store guardian hadn’t rejected Google Voice. A spokesman for the mothership has popped to cry foul, but the damage has been done with everyone now wondering what if anything federal regulators will do now.

Google’s confidential reply to the FCC in the matter of its rejected Voice app says that Apple did indeed reject the telephony app because it duplicated what Apple calls a “core iPhone function.”

When CEO Rob Glaser very publicly announced his company was submitting an iPhone app for App Store approval, nearly everyone assumed Apple’s censors would reject it, providing some down low publicity for Real’s also ran Rhapsody music service. Lo and behold, their app hasn’t been rejected and is now certain to slide into ignominious obscurity.