I realise that looks the wrong way round. Palm is the smaller company. The weedy David to Apple’s giant Goliath. But each time the chance to go to war with a company several times its size has been presented, Palm has reached for it with both hands like a 19-stone man lunging for cake.

I’m talking, in case you’re not following the smartphone market as closely as you should, about Palm’s moronic battle to keep the Pre compatible with iTunes.

Now the Pre has been patched to work with iTunes again, a development so tedious it may as well have been written by Dan Brown. Does Palm really think people will buy the Pre because you can use it with iTunes?

The story so far goes like this. Palm releases the Pre in June. One of the claims the marketers made at the time was that it was compatible with iTunes. It was a sort of hook to get iTunes or iPhone users to think about transferring because they wouldn’t have to change their music software.

But iTunes is only for Apple hardware. It’s a bit silly, I grant you, but it’s Apple’s software and I suppose Apple can do whatever it wants with it. It could make iTunes only compatible with people whose names began with ‘H’, if it wanted.

So a few weeks later Apple releases iTunes 8.2.1. If you had a Pre and you upgraded iTunes, iTunes would no longer work with your handset.

Then Palm released a new version of the Pre’s firmware, and iTunes started working again.

Then Apple released iTunes 9, and the Pre was once again incompatible.

It’s at this point everyone watching began gnawing the side of their hands and wishing that Palm, or Apple, or ideally both, would vanish off the face of the planet.

Now the Pre has been patched to work with iTunes 9 again, a development so monumentally tedious and predictable it might as well have been written by Dan Brown. Does Palm really think people will buy the Pre because you can use it with iTunes?

Then there’s the very questionable wisdom of getting into a scrap with one of the world’s most successful smartphone manufacturers at a time when your own survival is anything but guaranteed. Palm is a company which had to clarify a few days ago that it wasn’t laying people off. No, it’s “better aligning our staff with our business objectives,” which could mean anything. And even if it’s not firing people, it lost $164.5 million dollars in the first quarter of 2009, and that’s bad news however you look at it.

The constant tit-for-tat is being started by Palm every time. It’s bad for the Pre’s image, not least because those likely to buy it – consumers – are unlikely to tolerate repeatedly being shut out of iTunes while Palm scrambles to release another update for long. Palm should let iTunes go and leave Apple alone. It has enough problems already.