You know, if Apple's determined to turn the digital music scene into one big "Us versus Them" battle, we figure the company needs as much help on its side as possible. You may have forgotten about one such ally: Hewlett-Packard. Don't worry, you're excused; it was ages ago when the company announced that it'd be preloading iTunes on every HP and Compaq home computer. We're not sure when the preloading started, but the company has had a special iTunes download link for existing customers live since March. Between Apple's iTunes downloads and HP's preloading, there could be a sizeable fleet of Wintels out there with iTunes in line ahead of Windows Media Player 10.

Of course, the part of the Apple-HP agreement that everyone fixated on was HP's announcement that it'd be selling a rebranded iPod sometime this summer, which, coupled with iTunes lurking preinstalled on the hard drives of a solid number of Wintels shipped this year, makes for a hefty preemptive strike against Microsoft's imminent onslaught. There's just one problem: summer's almost over and HP still hasn't shipped a single 'Pod-- but luckily, that's about to change. According to MacRumors, the hPod was originally going to be a 3rd-generation iPod, but the delay arose once HP found out about the upcoming 4th-generation models and decided to wait. The HP-branded models are expected to appear at hpshopping.com beginning September 5th, which is a few days after Microsoft's music store is expected to go live, but we'll take what we can get. There's no word yet when the hPods will reach the retail channel.

Interestingly, MacRumors reports that the hPod's "body color is expected to be 'HP Blue,'" like the delicate corpse-colored prototype that Carly Fiorina held aloft when she broke news of the partnership. But we've since heard that HP may have scrapped the dead-body color scheme, presumably because white is so heavily identified with the iPod experience. If our own sources are correct (and we'd bet a shiny nickel that they are-- well, maybe a Canadian nickel), hPods won't be blue after all, but will look practically identical to Apple's 4th-gen models except for the HP logo on the back.

Other differences? Well, you can't get it engraved, so there'll be no "CONGRATULATIONS ON THE BUTT TUCK, EUNICE" iPod coming from HP, but on the plus side we hear that the "Apple iPod from HP" (as they may be oh-so-snappily named) comes with a full one-year warranty-- including phone support, which, as you all know, Apple has recently trimmed back to a single incident within the first 90 days of ownership. We've got no word on pricing yet, but we'd be surprised if there's much variance from Apple's prices either way.

Anyway, we'll see what comes to pass, but in any event, with HP pushing non-"Plays for sure" iPods on its sizeable chunk of the Wintel market, Apple stands a far better chance of not seeing its music platform crumble to dust as soon as Microsoft's music store touches down. It's a pity that hPods didn't sell sooner, since a larger installed base would obviously help even more-- but at least they're here in time for the holiday shopping season, which we expect to be a bloodier tussle than anyone's yet seen. We strongly recommend that you don protective garb before the fur starts to fly.