Remember the recent unconfirmed quotes from the BBC that a version of the iPlayer was coming for the hallowed iPhone? Well in a surprise move, no doubt trying to gain a little momentum with today’s SDK furore, a limited selection of shows from the iPlayer have been made available to UK residents on their iPhones. It’s worth noting, however, that the service makes use of existing technologies on the iPhone — not anything announced today.

At the moment only the BBC-produced ‘Whistleblower’ documentary seems to be working from the iPlayer website, with content being streamed-only via the iPhone’s built-in QuickTime player — quite the surprise given the heavy use of Windows-only technologies until fairly recently — although we’d guess there’s more shows on the way.

Of course, it’s a beta service (when aren’t they?) so you may not be able to access all the content and the usual caveats apply. As ever, the iPlayer is only for UK residents.

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If you abhor the fact that most of the mp3s being sold online have DRM, well then this tidbit of news might be able to make you guys smile. 7digital.com has just announced that they will be offering DRM-free MP3s from Warner Music International, a division of the Warner Music Group.

In fact, 7digital.com is the first major European download store to offer people in UK, Ireland, Spain, France, and Germany, mp3 downloads from Warner Music. Eighty percent of the total 3.5 million tracks from 7digital.com is now MP3, alongside formats such as WMA and AAC.

What’s great about this is that these songs that can be downloaded can be readily played in various MP3 players, including the world-famous iPod.

With this latest offering, Ben Drury, CEO of 7digital.com, said

7digital.com is excited to be Warner Music’s first major partner in Europe to bring MP3s to the marketplace. Our 1.2 million registered customer base has proved to us that MP3s sell very well and MP3 is currently the format of choice for digital media consumers.

7digital.com is committed to becoming the destination for MP3s and we plan to make our entire music catalogue available in DRM-free, high-quality MP3 format by summer 2008.

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It was recently announced that consumers will be able to access Encyclopaedia Britannica through their iPhones. This means that as long as you have your iPhone, you will no longer be caught unaware and can look up pertinent facts about almost any subject quickly and efficiently.

The iPhone-optimized site offers full-text searching, thousands of high-resolution thumbnails that expand to full-size images, and page layouts optimized for cell phone bandwidth. The entire database is said to be fully searchable and hot-linked in a method similar to Encyclopaedia Britannica’s Web editions.

In case you want to find out more about accessing the Encyclopaedia Britannica on your iPhone, feel free to follow our Source Link below.

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Quite unsurprisingly, Apple’s online music retailer store iTunes ranked as the second biggest music retailer in the U.S., according to NPD Group’s 2007 sales count. iTune’s sales accounted to a six percent increase in digital music sales, aside from the video and movie content available in iTunes.

The sales increase has attributed to a decline in CD sales, however. According to Reuters, about a million audiophiles in the U.S. stopped buying music CDs in favor of digital downloads last year. This change of media preference pulled the music industry’s performance down by 10 percent.

Apple’s popular music retail store currently serves about 50 million customers, and digital music downloads make up about 10 percent of music sales in the United States. Approximately four billion songs were bought and downloaded from iTunes.

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Online retailer Play.com has launched a new MP3 download service called PlayDigital. The store now sells digital music tracks without DRM (digital rights management) copy protection, in a move it is describing as “taking on iTunes in the UK”.

All of the downloads available at PlayDigital will be in the MP3 file format. This is the most common format for digital audio, so that the widest possible range of computer media players and portable music players will be compatible with the music you download.

The top 100 tracks will cost from 65p per track and albums from £4.99. Play.com said albums in the top 100 would be available £1 cheaper than on Apple’s download service, iTunes.

Now you will be able to download DRM free music onto your iPod or any other MP3 player.

Research analysts have reported in recent days that Apple is aggressively cutting back production on iPods and iPhones, while increasing production on Mac computers.

Craig Berger, an analyst with FBR Research, told clients in a research note this week that Apple has reduced orders for iPhones and iPods for the second time in two months.

“For both iPods and iPhones, we believe Apple was previously targeting a roughly 50 percent quarter-over-quarter decline for first quarter units, whereas we now think the firm is targeting a 60 percent quarter-over-quarter unit decline for first-quarter units,” he wrote.

Apple has filed an application with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office seeking trademark protection in relation to a variety of gaming products. On the application, Apple requests protection of its “Apple” trademark for products that include “Toys, games and playthings, namely, hand-held units for playing electronic games; hand-held units for playing video games; stand alone video game machines; electronic games other than those adapted for use with television receivers only; LCD game machines; electronic educational game machines; toys, namely battery-powered computer games.” Apple currently sells iPod games through the iTunes Store, several of which were developed internally by the company.