Apple eyes up flash-player market

Rivals beware, Apple has its giant eye on another area of the digital music market not already cornered by its ubiquitous iPod.

Chief executive Steve Jobs sent out a war cry at the Macworld conference last week to conquer the flash-memory MP3 player market - machines that use flash memory instead of hard disks to store music.

He unveiled the iPod Shuffle, a diminutive brother of the hugely successful iPod and iPod mini, as his weapon of choice in the campaign.

The Shuffle is smaller than a pack of chewing gum and weighs less than an ounce. It comes in two models, 512MB (or up to 120 songs) for $178 and 1 GB for $274.

Since Apple introduced the iPod mini this time last year to attack the high end of the flash-player market, its share of the total market for portable digital music players jumped from 31 to 65 per cent, with more than 10 million units now sold.

That kind of success turns heads.

"We've taken a look at the market and it's a zoo," Jobs said. "There are a zillion little flash players, the market is fragmented, no one has very much market share, no one is investing, marketing and growing the market, the products are pretty much the same."

He said most players used non-rechargeable batteries, and while they tried to be as easy to use as an iPod, they had tiny displays and buttons.

"The result is a real tortured user interface."

Jobs said Apple designers "noodled" on alternatives, and noticed that the most popular way iPod users listened to music was in the shuffle setting, where songs are plucked from the playlist in random order.

"With Shuffle, you don't have to find music, it shuffles up for you. We decided to make a flash-based player around shuffle."

Apple says the Shuffle offers greater capacity at a lower price than most of the competing flash players.

There is no display, just a control wheel to play or pause, adjust the volume and jump to the previous or next song. It can be used in shuffle mode or run through the pre-set playlist.

Its 12-hour battery recharges when the user plugs it into the USB port of a Mac or PC.

Users also have an option of assigning as much of the memory as they want for data storage.

The iPod and the iTunes online music store have allowed Apple to take a flagship role in the transition to delivering music digitally to new formats.

Jobs said he wanted to ensure the company remained at the forefront with other digital products.

"We are leading the digital media revolution."

The just-released Mac Mini is part of that strategy. The small-format, relatively cheap computer - the entry level model with a 40GB hard disk and 1.25Ghz PowerPC processor is $949 - runs the full Mac OS X operating system.

Apple product marketing manager Eric Jue said many people were buying the one-piece iMac computer for the iLife applications, and the Mac Mini would make it more affordable to switch to the Mac platform.

"People want to manage their pictures and videos. They want to burn DVDs," he said.

Apple believes the digital media revolution needs powerful tools that are easy to use.

Jobs said this would be the year of high-definition video (HD). The ability to do real-time editing of HD video, now available in the high-end Final Cut Pro package, would be put in the $515 Final Cut Express.

At the level below that is Apple's iLife suite of media editing and management applications. iLife '05, available from next week for $142, or free on new Macs, will include the latest version of iTunes plus major upgrades to all the other applications, iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD and GarageBand.

Jobs said iPhoto would include better searching and organising, support for more image formats, including RAW and MPEG-4, and much better editing, so users would no longer need to switch to programs such as Adobe's Photoshop to tweak their pictures.

They would be able to create project folders that included pictures from multiple sources, and find photos instantly by keyword or by the date they were created.

Jobs said the iMovie '05 entry-level video editing tool would be dramatically faster and include a new feature called Magic iMovie, which could automatically import video, place clips on the Timeline, insert transitions and chapter markers, add a soundtrack, and even send the completed project to iDVD.

iDVD '05 included a feature that automatically copied a movie straight from the camera DVD - giving an added layer of back-up.

GarageBand included multi-track recording up to eight tracks, real-time music notation, which was a feature of Apple's high-end Logic audio software, and pitch and timing adjustment for music, said Jobs.

Where Apple has fallen down most in recent years is producing an OS X version of AppleWorks, its basic office productivity suite.

It is now starting to address that with iWork, a $142 package that includes a new version of the Keynote presentation software and Pages, a word processor and page-layout program suitable for creating newsletters, brochures or reports.

The company's Keynote 2 allows for the creation of animated text, animated builds, and the ability to import elements from iLife applications. The application also sports an interactive mode which can be used to run kiosk displays.

Content can be output in Flash (a form of animation for internet pages and applications, not the memory format), PDF and QuickTime, making it one of the easiest and cheapest ways available for people to create Flash pages.