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.
The iPods shuffle’s market share rose from 43% in February to 58% in March, with Oppenheimer positive that the flash-player market share will continue to grow.
He told Merrill Lynch analyst Steven Milunovich that Apple was “supply-constrained in March” suggesting that the figures for April will be more sales-tastic.
According to Apple’s own figures, the company now boasts a 90 per cent share of the hard disk-based MP3 player market and 70 per cent of the digital music download market.
Apple’s CFO asserted that “Apple isn’t feeling the competitive heat yet” from other digital media device manufacturers like Creative, Sony, iRiver and others, insisting that Apple “doesn’t appear concerned” about the threat from music-playing mobile phones.
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,”
Despite the much-publicised non-appearance of the iTunes-capable Motorola handset, Oppenheimer was equally upbeat about working with mobile phone operators.
Milunovich expects Apple to reveal iPods with wireless and video capacity before Christmas, guessing that new Ipods will be able to play short video clips.
Apple Exec: Shuffle Grabs 58% of Flash Player Market; What Cell Phone Threat?
Nokia continues to be the Big Cheese of the worldwide mobile handset market, shipping nearly twice as many phones as its nearest competitor, Motorola. 
The clever-clogs at Toshiba Research Europe have announced that they have been successful in applying quantum cryptography to the transmission of video and voice over IP. 
Toshiba’s quantum video link increases the security of communication systems by encrypting every single video frame with a unique digital key – so cracking one frame of a video would be useless unless all the other frames were cracked too. 
“Imagine if you received a letter, you opened that letter and read it, there is no way of telling if someone has read that letter en route. When you encode the information on single particles, the letter self destructs whenever someone else reads it.” 
Nokia has launched three new Nseries mobile multimedia handsets, capable of taking print-quality pictures, playing MP3s, reading e-mail, browsing the Web sites and viewing mobile TV. 
Nokia N90 
Images, videos and sound can be stored on the phone’s internal 31 MB memory or on the supplied 64 MB RS-MMC 
Joe Coles, Director of imaging product marketing at Nokia, stressed the consumer demand for camera-enabled mobiles: “The number one reason why people today purchase new handsets is the camera. Indeed, we foresee that by the end of 2005, over half a billion people worldwide will own a camera phone.” 
Real Networks is looking to up-end Apple’s iTunes store and nobble Napster To Go by launching a new music subscription services for portables music players. 
Rhapsody 25 is the entry-level standard service which is completely free to use. It’s being supported by advertising, initially Chrysler and is designed to tempt people to subscribe. It allows anyone who downloads Rhapsody’s Windows-based jukebox software to listen to 25 songs for free each month from Rhapsody’s library, with the option to purchase and download songs a la carte. There will also be 25 ad-free radio stations available. 
It’s been likened to having your CD collection on permanent hire purchase – once you lapse on your payments, you can kiss goodbye to your tunes. To old-school music fans, not owning your precious sounds is a bonkers proposition, but both Real and Napster believe there’s a market for subscription-based music downloads, with punters excited by the promise of filling an entire iPod for less than the price of two CDs. 
Digital-Lifestyles were on hand to witness a new world record being created, as former World Text Champion Arttu Harkki used a Treo 650 smartphone to type the fastest-ever email on the move using a QWERTY keyboard – using a single thumb. 
Before the record attempt could start, Hein Le Roux, official adjudicator from Guinness World Records explained the rules, “There are a lot of phones that incorporate QWERTY keyboards, and we need to make sure that the record is standard across all models. For this reason, we asked Arttu Harkki to type using just the thumb of one hand.” 
As the stopwatch-toting Le Roux looked keenly on, Harkki’s mighty uni-thumb went supernova as he bashed out the following message: 
Once I’d recovered from the high octane excitement of watching someone write a text message repeatedly, I asked Le Roux what the previous record had been, and was surprised to find that there hadn’t been one, because this was a new category. 
AbbiTalk, a West Sussex-based provider of Voice Over IP (VoIP) telephony services, is talking tough about its cut-rate broadband call packages, that offer customers extra telephone lines with discount local and UK call charges and no line rental. 
Prices start at £149 for “AbbiTalkBasicOne”, which provides one extra phone line, a unique number with Pre Pay phone account, an adaptor and a DECT digital cordless phone with digital answering machine. 
No line rental is charged and there’s no need to use a computer to make the calls as these are accomplished through the standard cordless handsets. 
BBCi has launched a programming service for digital satellite viewers showcasing short films made by ordinary folk across the UK. 
Video Nation broke new ground when it first hit UK TV screens – running in short slots dropped in to the programming schedule. 
Content on the ‘Your Stories’ service is divided into daily themes, each with its own title. “My Music”, for example, featured an eight-year-old trumpet player and a blind pianist. 
BBCi controller, Rahul Chakkara, explained the reasoning behind Your Stories service: “The BBCi audience is maturing, and is looking for content that is social and highly involving, available to them whenever they want.” 
Unlike several telecoms companies in the US who are hell bent on blocking free Wi-Fi hotspots, BT has stated that it has “no problems” with the concept. 
The network covers the length of Upper Street – one of the busiest streets in Islington – with the Council donating PCs to some local businesses as part of its push to boost economic activity in the area and to encourage local residents onto the Internet. 
Clark does not envisage US-style legal wrangling in the future for the UK and expressed confidence that if more people use Wi-Fi it will drive demand for BT’s services. 
ITN is set to steal a march on its rivals by delivering up-to-the minute election analysis and comment through a partnership with Vodafone Live! 
Nicholas Wheeler, managing director of multimedia content at ITN, commented: “This is a new facility using mobile technology that was not available at the time of the last election.”