According to a study released in April 2006 by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the many forms of distractions (while you are in the car driving) are responsible for eight of every ten car accidents. Starting from this study, the Canadian Automobile Association wants to adopt strict rules through which the younger drivers will not be allowed to use Mp3 players, cell phones and other portable devices while they’re driving.

According to the statement of the CAA president David Flewelling it seems like ‘restricting the use of electronic devices, such as cell phones, MP3 players and wireless hand-held devices, allows drivers to truly focus on the driving task’. Thinking about that a little bit we can realize that if for the cell phones the problem has been solved with the help of “hands-free devices”, why couldn’t iPod have something like that, especially for drivers?

Last month the employees of the Arlington plant were announced that they will be receiving 30-gigabyte video iPods as a reward for all their effort they put for this company. This was a big surprise for everyone especially because they worth about $300. But a bigger surprise came last week when the company, after gaining a lot of publicity for their kindness, laid-off 35 employees and were asked to give back their 30-gigabyte video iPods.

The employees are saying that they were under the impression that the iPods were theirs to keep so some had sold them or given them as gifts and that nothing was ever said about ever having to give back the 30-gigabyte video iPods. Company spokeswoman LuAnn Jenkins said that the digital music player were not a gift and that she didn’t know whether the company ever intended for the workers to keep the iPods.

It seems like Microsoft is determined to get higher then iPod in digital music industry. The company will launch at the end of this year a WiFi-enabled (download songs directly to the player) portable audio and video player which will surely compete with Apple’s iPod, a portal media player which gained billions of dollars in a few years. Microsoft’s digital music player will have a screen ‘bigger than that of the iPod video’ and also will have wireless Internet capability that would allow users to download music without being connected to a PC planning to let people download for free any songs they’ve already bought from the iTunes Music Store.

The Microsoft company already held negotiations with record companies and television networks in order to settle on terms that would allow Microsoft to sell music and video content online through a service similar to Apple’s iTunes Music Store. They are also planning to launch an MVNO next year using all Windows Mobile-powered HTC handsets. Concerning the popularity that Apple Computer’s iPod has, I don’t think they will be able to pass over it.

After finding out that Creative sued Apple over the iPods and iPod nanos importation and sale after importation into the United States, in the same day that Creative did this, Apple sued iPod rival, Creative Technology claiming that Creative Labs, the U.S. division of Creative Technology, infringes four patents in its hand-held digital players.

Phil O’Shaughnessy, a spokesman for Creative, said that Creative proactively held discussions with Apple in their efforts to explore amicable solutions and that ‘at no time during these discussions or at any other time did Apple mention to they the patents it raised in its lawsuit’. Anyway, the Apple’s iPod holds more the 75 per cent of the U.S. market while Creative controls less then 10 per cent.

The Russian paid MP3 music download site AllofMP3.com is now offering a software for downloading songs without entering to their site.
allTunes is a Windows and Smartphone interface to the AllofMP3 music library, permitting you to download high quality music easily.
The music downloads site offers about 40,000 albums. With only $0.11 you can download a four-minute song encoded at 192Kbps in the MP3 format. An entire album costs about $1-2, comparing to iTunes where for only one song you pay $0,99. Why? Because AllofMP3.com pays nothing to the music industry and to the artists, because they don’t have any signed contracts with the recording labels like iTunes has (iTunes pays about $0,75 to the recording labels).

Most of the MP3 player owners like Apple’s iPods. After finding out that the low price points and broad availability of legal music files will have as a consequence the growth of MP3 players’s market to nearly double by 2010, according to In-Stat research company, now we find out that Apple has about 49 per cent of the MP3 players market with its iPod digital player, almost half of MP3 player owners has an iPod.

The Apple iPod crazy ness is almost all over the world but in Japan is different. The iPod mania is alive holding 51.3% of the digital-music player market at the end of 2005 - about 4.2 million units - up from about 32% in 2004, according to research firm BCN.

According to a recent report by In-Stat research company, the low price points and broad availability of legal music files will have as a consequence the growth of MP3 players’s market- to nearly double by 2010. The market for flash-based and hard-disk drive (HDD)-based portable audio players will more than double in the next five years, from 140 million units in 2005 to 286 million by 2010. Apple’s iPod music player continues to dominate the rapidly growing MP3 player market as the survey also showed that nearly 50 percent of MP3 player owners had an iPod, representing a strong installed base. Apple’s iPod has been the top selling MP3 player in the US, garnering nearly 80 percent market share in March and leading by a wide margin in several international markets, such as UK, Japan, Australia, and Canada.