The heat on Apple to open up their iTunes/iPod combination went up another notch following an interview with Meglena Kuneva, the European Union’s Consumer Protection Commissioner.
In the interview with German weekly magazine Focus, published today, she poses the following question, “”Do you think it’s fine that a CD plays in all CD players but that an iTunes song only plays in an iPod?” It’s followed by a couple of words that are going to make uncomfortable reading for Apple, “I don’t. Something has to change.”
Music bought on the Apple iTunes online shop cannot be played on any other music player, apart from Apple’s iPod.
Kuneva is carrying out a review of the eight basic laws which govern cross-border consumer rights.
Pressure has been building for quite a while against Apple, with the latest, most significant one being in January as the Norwegian Consumer Watchdog, declaring iTunes to be illegal.
Previous actions have been, the approval of France’s ‘iTunes Law,’ after Apple narrowly avoided the French courts over their FairPlay DRM back in 2004.
Apple leader, Steve Jobs, wrote an open letter at the start of last month, entitled “Thoughts on Music,” where he said he’d drop DRM “in a heartbeat,” but was hamstrung by the content owners not allowing him to do so.
Three Quarters Of Consumers Naffed Off With Mobile Web
Mercer joined Apple in 1987 and was the lead designer of Version 7 of the Macintosh finder before founding a software tools firm called Pixo which was involved in designing the first version of the iPod user interface.
Voice-recognition software, Apple’s most advanced to date, can recite a speech highlighting the features of the device while injecting several clever digs at competitors. 
After growing tired of endless beer-fuelled, late night rummages around the house for a mountain of easily-lost remote controls, we thought we’d check out an all-in-one controller. 
The Kameleon only managed to find one set of codes that immediately worked on our devices; there was nothing for our 3 year old AV Yamaha amp and it neither had codes for our new Humax PVR nor wanted to learn any either (the learning process involved us continually bashing a single button, but the remote kept quitting before it found anything for the PVR).
By this time we were beginning to harbour thoughts about how far we could throw the streamlined remote, but thought we’d drop One For All a line for help instead.
Moreover, we were reminded of the shortcomings of ‘virtual’ buttons versus real hardware buttons – groovy glowing buttons emerging from the darkness of a black remote may look the stuff of Spock, but ‘real’ buttons remain easier to use and more responsive to the touch (something that those dreaming of an iPhone might want to consider).
This just feels wrong on just about every level we can think of, but in an attempt to reach out to Da Yoot, the US Army have created a slick and highly polished MySpace recruitment site.
A warning next to the psychopathic-looking Sgt Star warns, “The information you enter is to be used only for recruiting Soldiers into the U.S. Army and the Army Reserve.”
We apologised: “OK. Sorry. We want to go to Iraq and bomb some soft Johnny Foreigners back into the Stone Age in the name of peace.” 
Clearly a sizeable wad of defence budget has been thrown at the slick game, which purports to offer realistic battlefield scenes (although we couldn’t find any options to rain friendly fire on Brit troops and then try and cover up the investigation afterwards.)
Of course, there’s sound business reasoning behind the US Army shoving its shiny size nines onto a social networking site like MySpace, with the site able to interact with the community, make friends and receive comments and – possibly – make the Army look vaguely cool and enticing.
Digital camera heavyweights Sony have rolled out their first wireless Cyber-Shot digital camera, the 6-megapixel Cyber-shot DSC-G1.
There’s also a memory slot onboard for storing yet more photos, but Sony are sticking with their less widespread Memory Stick Duo/Memory Stick PRO Duo format, which can now store up to eight gigabytes.
Sigma have announced the full details of their new DP1 camera, a high end point’n’shoot digital camera packing a hefty 14 megapixels resolution with a full size image sensor.
Camera controls
The 28mm fixed lens is disappointingly slow at just f4, but this may be compensated by improved high ISO performance.
Specifications
A few months ago Palm shelled out $44 million to Japan’s Access Systems for a perpetual license of the operating system used by Treo smartphones and PDAs, ensuring that current and future Palm handhelds remain compatible with Palm’s Garnet OS.
Treo 755p
A pretty staggering number, even when you realise that it includes all of the downloads and possibly all upgrades of the software (* We’re in the process of checking this with Skype HQ).
Gordon Brown has announced that a new labelling system for media content is in the works, designed to help parents protect their children from dodgy digital content.
As part of the scheme, Ofcom will introduce common labelling standards covering cinema, TV, radio, computer games and the internet.
When an important deal like