All Philips GoGear customers who've been laughed at by their mates with big shiny iPod Touches can now have the last giggle, or at least the latest one anyway. Philips has announced a deal with Napster such that all GoGear users will now have access to Napster's PC service and full list of 640,000 albums from 540,000 artists for absolutely zip.

Additionally, if you happen to be the owner of a GoGear Opus, Ariaz or Vibe you'll also get 30 days free access to the Napster To Go portable subscription service which would normally work out at £14.95 per month. Sure, a month's grace isn't a lot to play with but at the least you do get 90 ad free radio stations and recommendation software to play with as well as the on the hoof access as opposed to PC side-loading only.

It's hard to work out exactly how good this all actually is given that a) it's DRMed up to the hilt and b) there's a lot of free music services out there anyway but I don't suppose you can really argue with a sudden 10,000 folding of your effective music collection for both your mp3 player and home.

Philips / Naptser

Video Preview - Philips Ariaz and Opus GoGear

If you're anything like the girl on the right, you probably enjoy your mp3 music as it is. But if you're a serious audiophile, you may already be left raging at the amount that mp3 files miss out to keep the file size in the single digits. If that sums you up, then it's time to celebrate, because Thomson - one of the companies to come up with the original mp3 format - has developed MP3HD technology.

What does this mean to you? Well potentially nothing if it doesn't pick up, but if it does then you can expect higher quality audio with less sound loss than conventional mp3s. Mp3s achieve their svelte file size by discarding various bits of audio that the algorithm considers expendable. It essentially means that what you're hearing will always be of inferior quality to the original CD source, though it's questionable as to how many can tell the difference. In the days of smaller mp3 players (32mb ones used to be the norm, remember) this loss of quality was essential, but with flash memory and hard disk sizes growing every day, we can afford to be a little more selective in what should be left out.

When the Apple store drops off the internet for a few hours there's only ever one reason and now that the curtain is up again we've got a new look 4GB iPod Shuffle to coo about. Coo coo.

I'm not a massive iPerson but there's something very satisfying about this smaller, thinner, brushed aluminium MP3 player which Apple claims is the littlest music machine on the market. According to Jobs Inc, it's smaller than an AA battery. According to TD, it looks like a lozenge.

Philips has leant its range of budget MP3 players a long overdue refresh. Remember the GoGear? Well, ladles and jellyspoons, I give you - the GoGear Spark!

Yes, that's right; gather round, gather round. What once was a rather plain Jane super brain of mini OLEDs has become a fully colour 1.46-inch, 128mm x 128mm display. That aside, it's all pretty similar.

I've had this thing for far too long but after a fair bit of faffing around to find the right cables, I finally got a good go on the PK101 Pico projector from Optoma. So, grab yourself a cup of tea, sit back and I'll tell you all about it...

No official lumens rating before anyone asks - largely because it's embarrassingly small for a company like Optoma - but, to be fair, I think it would probably belie how good the thing is. The official price is £249 but I've seen one here for £234. Enjoy.

Optoma

Sony's forthcoming X-Series of touchscreen OLED MP3 players, which they're still insisting on calling a Walkman, are now available on Amazon to pre-order.

There's a 16GB model for £214, and a 32GB one for £283. Both come with the aforementioned OLED screen, and should be out in the next few weeks. Expensive, but they do look nice...

(via Engadget)

Lucky old Zara's in Lisbon. Am I jealous? Yes, I'm jealous, but it's not the jet-setting, room service and warm weather that I'm annoyed about missing out on...well, sort of...it's that she gets to play with all the new toys.

The latest transmission she's beamed back to Shiny HQ is a little look at two new MP3 players from Philips with stereo Bluetooth, QVGA screens, noise cancelling...oh, I'll let Zara tell you...

I was quite enamoured by the idea of the i2i Stream when I had a quick look at it at CES but then what's a concept until you've actually tried the bugger? So, it fell to the wonderful Susi from Shiny Shiny to take them for a spin and work out whether wireless music streaming is actually something that we need.

Pioneer's just revealed its latest in-car entertainment solution for the businessman trapped in a snow drift with no mobile signal or radio reception - the DEH-P4100SD.

The big selling point of the P4100 is its SD Card slot, allowing you to do away with the middle man (DJ, CD writer, iPod, cable) and load up your MP3 collection to a cheapo SD Card and whack it straight into your car via the slot hidden behind the removable faceplate.

Pioneer's "rotary commander" dial-slash-joystick lets you navigate through tunes while still managing to pay some attention to the road, while there's also full support for iPod playlists if you're the sort of person who likes to spend your spare time painstakingly sorting all your music into very tightly-organised groups...

I'm not sure I'd actually want a motion controlled mp3 player but I'd certainly like the skills to make one. I get the feeling it woudn't be such a clever gadget on the move but I love the SD card loading and the fact that it hooks up stereo as well as the seamless way it all works. Neat bit of hacking and really well shot vid. Well done, whoever you are...

(via Dvice)

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Despite its poor retail performance over Christmas, Microsoft remains firmly committed to its Zune MP3 player, and a good thing too. It's one of the few players in the market that has relentlessly innovated, and still packs features that are lacking on others, like wireless syncing and device-to-device song sharing.

Well, the pace continues. Marketing Director for Zune, Adam Sohn, has revealed to Cnet that "there will be new Zunes before the 2009 holiday season" and they'll be a "surprising step up" from what's currently available. That almost certainly means a touchscreen, but that isn't 'surprising' so I wonder what he could mean...

Whatever happens, it's unlikely to displace the iPod, but given Microsoft's track record of new features, I can't wait to see what they've got to offer.

Zune (via Cnet)

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Hooray! The tedious and long-running saga of the UK possibly adopting the 'three strikes' system for disconnecting the internet access of music pirates has been dumped, with David Lammy, the Intellectual Property Minister, today saying there are "no plans" to introduce such a scheme.

Last year, everyone thought the French Technique of ordering ISPs to disconnect the harder-core of music pirates was the way to go, with the UK apparently considering adopting the idea.

However, Lammy has just told The Times that the government has ruled out introducing legislation requiring ISPs to disconnect pirates, pointing out that "I'm not sure it's actually going to be possible."

A very good reason. Music body the BPI still wants the ban, but ministers and ISPs couldn't agree on how to implement such a politically-deadly and possibly riot-inducing plan. So carry on. Leave Bittorrent running overnight.

(Via The Times)

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It's a bit like a bicycle pump that makes electricity.

Or, if you've ever busted your hand and wrist using one, the nPower PEG is more like the battery-less torches that charge themselves up via kinetic energy - kinetic energy you provide by shaking the thing up and down, relying on a weight inside the unit to generate power through friction.

The PEG outputs enough electric juice to charge-up 90% of portable devices, including iPhones and most Nokias, although there's no battery in the PEG - so if your phone takes an hour to charge, you'll have to have the PEG jiggling about for an hour.

I can't possibly imagine any sort of activity that would involve jiggling about for an hour.

(Via CG)

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We've seen deadly iPod accessories before, but this is the first iPod accessory I've seen for killing people that aren't you. It's a handy iPod Touch mount for your sniper rifle. What do you mean you don't have a sniper rifle?

On the App Store, there's some matching ballistics software, called Bullet Flight. Though if you live in Washington DC, I wouldn't recommend buying it until tomorrow, unless you want a visit from the FBI. You can choose to correct for distance, wind direction, elevation and temperature. No coriolis effect, sadly.

In the meantime, it gets boring on a rooftop for hours on end - so what would be on a sniper's playlist? I've started making a Spotify playlist here. Let me know your suggestions in the comments.

(via the Firearm Blog)

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Susi went for a wander down to the Sony stand at CES 2009 to take a look at the latest Walkman the portable music original has to offer. Personally I'm not convinced by the song selection on the smaller and otherwise well designed W series but the touchscreen 32GB touchscreen Sony Walkman X looks very interesting indeed. See what you think.

The tech binge continues - more from CES 2009.

There hasn't been a massive amount of ground breaking stuff at this year's CES, but the MoveIt Mini from relative unknowns GiiNii has brought a warm glow to the depths of our cynical tech hearts. They're branding it an alternative to the iPod Touch, and for once, they're complete justified.

On the face of it, it's a WiFi enabled media player. With rubbish memory - just 256MB onboard. However, look under the hood and you'll find a MicroSD slot, so you can expand it to your hearts content. And even better, you'll find Android.

I was convinced my love for Star Wars was over years ago but a chance encounter with a table full of Trilogy themed cases for the iPhone and iPod touch made me think twice at CES 2009.

They'll be out in all good iPhone accessory shops within the next two months for whatever the equivalent of $29.95 will be at the time. Some, like the Chewbacca and light saber models are all soft and rubbery. Others, like the Death Star and transparent Stormtrooper, are as hard as Vader himself.

Slightly amazing that these aren't all over the place already, even more surprising that I foud myself squealing like a squealy girl with delight when saw them.

CES 2009 can be found all over this page.

Dan got hands on with the latest media player from Samsung, which boasts a full touchscreen. You can read all about it here, but watch the vid for real life moving pictures.

I always get slightly confused by the way Sony doesn't group its gadgets by what they are, just by broad product ranges. As a result, there are cameras and phones with the Cyber-shot badge, and MP3 players and mobiles with the Walkman badge. From the product name alone, it's often impossible to tell what the device is.

Well, to clear up the confusion, both the products here are phones. The first is an 'affordable' 3.2 megapixel cameraphone, called the C510. Although there's a comparative lack of megapixels on the sensor compared to other cameraphones, it's got plenty of features to make up for it.

This beauty is the new Sony WALKMAN X range - featuring a 3" OLED touch screen to make videos look marginally better than they have ever looked before. Although they won't look very good when you've had your fingers all over the screen for six months.

The X1050 and X1060 both feature digital noise cancelling technology, FM tuners, the 3" 432x240 screen and come with 16 or 32GB of storage space. Here's a big photo of it, as it's rather pretty. That's not my music. That's someone else's music.

The WALKMAN X is even packed with a wi-fi chip and custom BBC iPlayer tool for watching telly wherever there's some wireless broadband to nick, plus it'll do YouTube and play MP4 videos, WMVs and H.264 material. Sony says you'll be able to have a WALKMAN X in "spring 2009" - and we think quite a few people will be taking it up on that offer.

There's more like this on our vast CES 2009 mega-page.