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.

Apple’s serious about mobile gaming — the company’s newest iPhone and iPod touch models include best of class ARM processors, a good bit o’ RAM and richly detailed OpenGL graphics. Moreover, Cupertino’s been kitting out its in-house iPhone game development team with Graeme Devine of Halo Wars fame already on board.

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.

Sometime next week, what is arguably the most overpriced app for the iPhone, TomTom, will add a very basic feature for its genre – pronounced street names. Should we be excited?

Fresh news from the alternate universe inhabited by the mothership’s App Store grannies and developers: the guy behind the most popular app on the platform is quitting in disgust. It seems that the app review process and the people behind it are tools of the devil, or maybe just tools, a state of affairs which is hardly unique.

Motorola purportedly supplied Verizon with 200,000 units and an analyst estimates the carrier sold – its huge network and all – only half of those. This compares quite poorly with the 1 million iPhone 3GS’ Apple sold over the first weekend back in June, months before anyone was willing to say the recession was over.

The long rumored iPhone nano could be on the verge becoming a reality, according to a rumor out of Taiwan. Moreover, reportedly smaller version of Apple’s world changing smartphone will pack quite a wallop as it’s expected to bridge incompatible CDMA and UMTS wireless systems, raising hopes once again of the iPhone coming to Verizon.

With the world going mad, mad, mad for the Motorola Droid and HTC Android from Verizon, AT&T is purportedly looking for a strategy to counter the hype. Then again, slashing the price of Apple’s flagship phone so early in the product cycle might be more than Steve Jobs is willing to give this holiday season.

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.

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.