Apple is elbowing its corporate presence onto Glastonbury Festival with a launch at world famous music event later this week, according to a report in MacWorld.
Details are nearly as scarce as festival tickets, but the site cites third-party reports suggesting that all will be revealed on Friday, June 24 at the East Dance stage, where the first act up listed in the official Glastonbury Festival website is called, “iTunes present…”
This will feature winners of a competition run between iTunes and Hit40UK which asked budding musos to create a five-song iMix of tracks they felt appropriate for kick-starting the Dance stage this year.
The competition page ran the blurb: “Runners-up will also bag themselves some great iTunes Glastonbury Essentials cards which get them 75 tracks of the hottest Glastonbury tunes on the iTunes Music Store”. Apple’s Glastonbury Essentials compilation was listed as being worth £19.75 (~€30, ~US$36).
MacWorld mulls over the suggestion that these iTunes “Essentials cards” could auger an extension of Apple’s existing band promo cards.
These take the form of fan-tempting collectible iTunes cards stuffed full of band-specific artwork and special codes that let mustard-keen fans download tracks from a specific artist or album.
These cards have previously been used as tickets to events like Apple’s “Live from London”.
Naturally, we’ll be at Glastonbury trying to get our hands on some of these “Essential cards”, but with thousands of more interesting non-corporate offerings on display, we can’t promise that we won’t get hopelessly sidetracked at the world’s greatest festival.
A report by compilers Mintel International has revealed that pets are being ousted by consumer electronics in British homes. 
The study observed that, “In those families with children, the demand for pets may not be as strong as it once was, since many children now prefer to immerse themselves in the world of computer games and TV programmes”. 
But it’s not all bad news for our precious pampered pooches and treasured tabbies, with the report revealing that sales of pet food, accessories and pet insurance have rocketed by 24 percent in the past five years, reaching a total of US$6.5 billion. 
With the rise of home entertainment robots like the Sony Aibo and the forthcoming Nintendo virtual pet game, Nintendogs (where virtual dogs will respond to voice commands and bark at passing Nintendog consoles), we wonder how long it will be before children think that pets live on batteries. 
Finnish mobile phone giants Nokia have launched a new Web browser for their Series 60 smartphones. 
“Nokia is excited to enrich Series 60 with optimised mobile Web browsing. Open source software is an ideal basis for development since it enables Nokia to leverage and contribute to speedy software innovation and development. As a result, the entire Series 60 value chain, from manufacturers and operators to end-users, will benefit from the flexible architecture, full Web compliance and a truly enjoyable user experience,” enthused Pertti Korhonen, Chief Technology Officer, Nokia. 
Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing reckons the new browser is the dog’s nadgers: “The Safari Web Kit’s blazing performance, efficient code base and support for open standards make it an ideal open source technology for projects like Nokia’s new Series 60 browser.” 
The rumours have been floating around the Internet for weeks, but it now seems certain that Apple will announce later today that it will be switching its computers to Intel’s. 
When asked about the deal he said that the company has long pursued a deal with Apple, adding, “We always talk to Apple. Apple is a design win that we’ve coveted for 20 years and we continue to covet them as a design win. We will never give up on Apple.” 
Just 17 days after releasing its ‘Tiger’ OS X 10.4 operating system, Apple has issued a sizeable bug fix update after growing gripes from customers. 
Russians were also most annoyedski to find the iDVD player bombing when the operating system was set to their home language (something that affected a host of other languages too). 
“A lot of things [at Apple] are pretty secretive; there aren’t necessarily as many eyes looking over the products as there could be,” said Wilcox, commenting on the company’s decision to use a limited group of beta testers looking at the code. 
Microsoft ubermensch Bill Gates foresees mobile phones overtaking MP3s as the top choice among portable music players, while dismissing the popularity of Apple’s iPod player as unsustainable. 
“If you were to ask me which mobile device will take top place for listening to music, I’d bet on the mobile phone for sure,” Gates told the newspaper. 
Yahoo has slapped a king-sized gauntlet on the floor as it announced plans to roll out an aggressively-priced online music service. 
Yahoo’s hugely popular Website – visited by 100 million US users every month – should give their music service a big head start, with the company being able to let rip with the kind of massive marketing muscle that few online music rivals can match. 
Yahoo’s subscription service will work with selected portable MP3 players that use Microsoft’s digital-music format – there’s currently around compatible 10 devices available, including Dell’s DJ player and Creative Technology’s Zen Micro. 
The new service will include free software a la Apple’s iTunes jukebox, with the bonus of letting subscribers rummage around in their friends computers for songs, and then listen to their tracks if the music is part of Yahoo’s catalogue. 
After months of rumours on the Web, details of palmOne’s new LifeDrive PDA have finally shown up on Amazon. 
NormSoft’s Pocket Tunes is able to play MP3, WMA, Ogg Vorbis, and WAV files and the unit will also support full screen video and photo playback. 
The LifeDrive comes with USB 2.0, so transferring files onto the microdrive should be a fairly nifty business. 
It’s that time again, a new version of OS X has been released! For those that aren’t aware of OS X, it’s Apple’s operating system. As usual, OS 10.4 is named after a cat: 10.2 was named Jaguar, 10.3 Panther, and the new 10.4 has been titled Tiger.
Purring like a cat recumbing in cream, Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer revealed that Apple’s iPod shuffle has snaffled a 58 per cent share of the flash-based digital media market in the US. 
Positively glowing with confidence, Oppenheimer claimed that MP3 capability in handsets will be more complementary than a replacement, with handsets suffering from “a worse user interface and limited battery life,”