Poor iTunes 8.2, not even a week and its code has been sifted and (some of?) its secrets laid bare. Apple Insider reveals details including:

• radio capabilities along with a corresponding ability to tag songs so that they can later be purchased from the iTunes store
• additional string shows the ability to change VoiceOver settings to manage aspects of the Nike+ application

So, Nike+ like the iPod touch, VoiceOver like the iPod shuffle — looks like Apple isn’t only adding new features to the next gen iPhone, but leveraging features they’ve added to the rest of the line since the last gen iPhone. Good way for Apple to keep the iPhone “the best iPod we’ve ever made”, isn’t it?

[Thanks daveizzle for the tip!]

When iTunes 8.2 debuted in prerelease form (for developers running the iPhone 3.0 beta firmware), one of the more exciting features from the back-end perspective was crash logs being made available via iTunes Connect.

Well, Hassan from Inside Redbox Mobile reminded us that, with iTunes 8.2 going into general availability — and into the hands of consumers — developers now have access to the full range of crash logs from their full base of installed customers. Bug. Fixing. Goldmine. (See the Inside Redbox Mobile crash log report, above.)

From the consumer standpoint, the information looks to be as anonymized as anything else sent from iTunes to Apple — Genius info, for example — and in exchange for sharing, users will likely get more stable apps.

Sounds good to us!

[Thanks Hassan!]

Palm faithful rejoice, Gizmodo — via an unnamed source — claims that Palm Pre still syncs with iTunes 8.2 release, same as it reportedly did with the pre-release version.

Meanwhile, Daring Fireball weighs in on the situation again, this time wondering if what Palm is doing is illegal, and if Apple stops it, whether that would be illegal. PreCentral.net, for their part, looks beyond the what to the why:

we’re increasingly getting the feeling that Palm is either trying to goad Apple into a legal showdown or they are so confident in their patent portfolio that they feel they can throw these features in Apple’s face.

To which Gruber aptly footnotes:

And, when judging the likelihood of Apple filing such a lawsuit, consider the perspective of a certain highly-competitive quasi-paranoid Apple founder and CEO who is famously sensitive to what he perceives as being “ripped off”. The one and only company to ship a product that successfully masquerades as an iPod via USB is the company whose engineering division is run by a former Apple senior VP and has hired a slew of former Apple engineers.

In — as they say — deed.

Jeremy already passed along the warning from the iPhone Dev-Team on iTunes 8.2. In case you missed it, they told jailbreakers and potential jailbreakers NOT to install Apple’s just-released iTunes update.

According to their latest Dev-Team Blog post, the reason seems to be:

It breaks your ability to use QuickPwn, PwnageTool, and iPhone Tunneling Suite (ssh over usb). We don’t think this is a deliberate breakage of these tools. It’s just that Apple has updated a low-level USB protocol that normally only Apple cares about (but jailbreakers care about).

Is Dev-Team working on a fix? Youbetcha, but they don’t want to release anything further until iPhone OS 3.0 is final. This may annoy people who have the 3.0 beta, but legit developers probably have more pressing concerns than jailbreaking at the moment, and why would the Dev-Team waste their energy and tip their hand to Apple when the betas will likely keep changing every couple of weeks before release anyway?

Of course, the blogsphere now has another concern, since last week’s announcement that the Palm Pre syncs with iTunes, likely by faking Apple’s USB protocols to disguise itself as an iPod (see Daring Fireball‘s take on this as well). There have been two pre-release versions of iTunes 8.2, going back over a month, but the obvious question still becomes: will the iTunes 8.2 final release also effect the Palm Pre sync?

Dev-Team thinks it’s possible:

It may actually break Palm Pre’s connection to the device (please give us feedback on this).

We think Palm’s Jon Rubinstein — who used to head the iPod division at Apple — may just have compromising pictures of the iPhone taken during it’s “bachelor” party the night before Macworld 2007 … We mean, it’s got to be something, right?

Available to developers in pre-release form to coincide with iPhone 3.0 Beta 4 and Beta 5, Apple has just pulled the switch on iTunes 8.2 for everyone. At the same time, they’ve also released QuickTime 7.6.2. Since QuickTime is a core technology to many Apple and Mac components, no doubt other updates (like GarageBand for Mac, pictures above) will follow.

If you notice anything new we haven’t already covered, let us know in the comments!

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in! Check the TiPb iPhone Forums for updates on what's new]

Along with iPhone 3.0 Beta 5, which appears to hide away MMS functionality for AT&T, Apple also seeded the second pre-release version of iTunes 8.2, which looks like it blocks editing of the iPhone carrier file. In previous beta releases, developers were able to use the carrier file to enable tethering, something built into iPhone 3.0 by Apple but entirely dependent on as-yet-not-given carrier approval.

Did AT&T ask for the new lockdown? Perhaps the MMS stripping as well? Nothing but speculation so far…

(Thanks Andrew for the tip!)

Ars Technica reports, with some very nice commentary and screen caps from Equivalence (iTunes link) for iPhone, that:

One of the most requested features from developers, automated crash reports, can now be submitted by users via iTunes 8.2. Developers can access the reports via iTunes Connect.

No code is ever perfect, but anything that helps developers make their apps more solid for more users is certainly appreciated.

iPhone 3.0 Beta 4 required iTunes 8.2 Pre-Release to install, and it looks like iTunes 8.2 Pre-Release requires… Mac OS Leopard 10.5.7 in order to sync notes now. Which, of course, is not yet available.

Previous iPhone 3.0 Betas have synced perfectly well under the current Mac OS release, 10.5.6.

A sign of 10.5.7′s immanent arrival? Perhaps. A more interesting question is what’s changed in note sync to require it where previous betas did not?

(via daveizzle on Twitter)

MacRumors, via a user in their forums, is reporting that iTunes 8.2 could have some Blu-Ray functionality? Check out their post for details.

Steve Jobs famously called Blu-Ray licensing a “bag of hurt” when asked about it previously, but there’s been some chatter to suggest licensing has been somewhat de-hurt-bagged recently. Still, Apple hasn’t announced any first-party Blu-Ray hardware, so we’re not sure what to make of this at the moment.

In any event, unless they start including iPhone-friendly “digital copies” for transfer directly from the BD disks, it won’t change things for our mobile devices anyway.