Technofile: It'll probably take a little while longer to hit these shores, but as sure as eggs are eggs, Apple will start to sell movies as well as music and TV shows from its spectacularly successful iTunes Music Store.
Apple's chief executive Steve Jobs is negotiating personally with Hollywood studios, according to Variety magazine, and wants a flat $9.99 price (€7.94) for all movies in the US.
This doesn't sit too well with the industry, which prefers to sell blockbusters for more than straight-to-DVD flops.
Plus, Apple is going to have to improve the quality of its video downloads, which can be stomached on an iPod, but not on a widescreen TV.
It looks like DVDs have a while yet to run after all, especially in the age when high-definition TV DVDs are coming out.
Olympus has released a new voice recorder. The Voice Trek G-10 comes with a built-in USB jack, which plugs directly into the PC for transfer. Although packing a fairly lightweight 256MB of memory, on a low-quality setting, you can record 69 hours of audio into this small device in Windows media audio (WMA) format.
Plus it will play back MP3 files. Pricing has yet to be announced, but it's likely to be fairly affordable.
Sharp has launched a new DVD player, which packs a bigger punch than the average DVD player. The DV-SV97H DVD/DivX upconverting player unusually plays DivX files - a format more commonly associated with illegal file sharing of movies alongside a wide range of standard DVD formats as well as MP3s, pictures and MPEG videos. It also has Dolby Digital and an HDMI output which can "upconvert" DVDs to a higher quality picture equivalent to high definition. Look online for prices.
Sony Ericsson has come out with an update on its K610 3G mobile (pictured). The K610im - the i-mode 3G phone - is offered by O2 for its i-mode mobile internet service.
The black casing features a 2-megapixel camera with 2.5x digital zoom and a VGA camera for video calling.
Internal memory starts at 64MB, but can be expanded to 1GB.
In addition to the usual other features, it has Bluetooth and e-mail which gets "pushed" to you rather than requiring you to check - an advantage of i-mode.
Speaking of 3G, Nokia is also attempting to attract the mass market to speedier 3G services with its latest mobile, the budget-priced 6151 3G mobile phone.
To be released later this year, it will cost around €240 without a sim card. It won't have a front-mounted camera, so there will be no video calling available, but it does have a 1.3 megapixel camera, FM radio and Bluetooth.
You may have seen Google Earth, the software from the search giant which allows you to fly around the planet and zoom in from space into hugely detailed aerial photos of just about anywhere.
Well, a new version is now available for download. But if your machine is not up to this demanding software, you can now do almost the same thing just by visiting FlashEarth.com.
Although it doesn't have all of Google Earth's bells and whistles, this Shockwave Flash version is amazing when you first try it out and find yourself staring at the Forbidden City in Beijing or Manhattan Island in the space of two minutes.
