Guitar bands may well be back in, but all those clunky effects pedals and old-school spaghetti cables are unlikely to impress the chix at the front, so aspiring Rock Gods may want to check out the new iAxe USB Guitar.
As the name suggests, this Strat-shaped guitar comes with a USB port, allowing aspiring six string warriors to plug into their laptops and access a host of cool effects.
The guitar certainly looks the part, sporting a maple neck, solid body, single-coil pickups with 5-way switching, shiny chrome machine heads and a whammy bar letting you go for a bite while the sustain continues making that ‘eeeeeeeee’ sound.
The ‘idiot proof’ software supplied lets bedroom plank spankers jam along to their own music, with the ability to slow down or speed up tracks to learn those tricky licks and difficult ‘shapes’.
There’s also a multi-track recording/editing function for laying down dual-guitar sonic attacks, delicately layered tracks or a Ronnie Spector wall of noise.
If your neighbours aren’t down with your late night, death metal interpretations of teenage angst expressed through the medium of a heavy fuzzbox effect, there’s a handy headphone socket to help keep the noise down to minus eleven.
The sound may well be Shea Stadium, but at just £99 the price is definitely Bull & Gate, and the USB iAxe is available now for wannabe six string renegades on the highway to desolation from online widget merchants, Firebox.
Not all the kids are feeling the digital love though, with 45 per cent of respondents spending but ne’er a bean on music.
When it comes to the real big spenders, the lucrative 20-24 year olds sector were flashing the most cash, with two thirds spending up to £10 a month on downloads, and 16 per cent spend from £10 to £20 a month.
Love has broken out between the two Apples – computers and music.
The terms of settlement are confidential.
High speed mobile phones and new gadgets are set to send revenue from mobile entertainment services soaring over the next five years, according to market research firm Informa Telecoms & Media.
“Advanced mobile content and services have been slow to take off, but this should not be confused with the deepening relationship that we have with our mobile phones,” commented report author Daniel Winterbottom, senior analyst at Informa Telecoms & Media.
User-generated content is also expected to grow, with Informa predicting that revenue from user-generated services will hit $13.17 billion by 2011.
Sony Ericsson in Japan is launching the snazzy new W51S phone which comes in a striking clamshell package.
The Organic Light Emitting Device (OLED) icons look rather dandy to our weary eyes, although work-shirkers probably won’t like not being able to see who’s actually calling before flipping open the phone and getting an irate boss on the line.
The W51S measures up at 105 × 48 × 19.3 mm, with talk time quoted at 210 minutes, with a standby time of 270 hours. For the security conscious, there’s also a feature letting users remotely lock and delete data on the handset over the web (Palm Treo users have been able to do this for years via excellent software like 
Sony Ericsson have let it be known via press invites that there’s a number of new handsets being released in Europe next Tuesday.
Oboe, the MP3Tunes.com online music service is increasing its previous 1Gb of free music storage to unlimited storage to some of its registered users.
Are you always late for work? Does your alarm clock fail to wake you up in the morning? Have you developed a reflex action that bashes the ‘alarm off’ button while you carry on counting sheep?
When it’s time for you to get out of your jimjams, this totally daft clock launches a flying propeller that hovers around the room, making strange buzzing noises while the clock’s alarm sounds.
Norway has declared iTunes to be illegal because it doesn’t allow songs downloaded from the online music store to be played on any other equipment except their own, today’s FT reported.
The original complaint was made by Torgeir Waterhouse, senior advisor to the Norwegian Consumer Council. He told the FT that “he was in negotiations with pan_European consumer groups to present a unified position on iTunes’ legality.”
Samsung has launched what it claims is the first mobile phone in the known universe to come with an optical joystick.
The slide-open phone also comes with an illumination sensor which automatically controls the brightness of the LCD screen and keypad, so you won’t be dazzled if the phone goes off in the middle of the night.