Apple's new iPod touch, nano and classic: Hands firmly on

Sadly there was no mention of a European iPhone launch date. But the iPhone wasn't without its stage time. Included with the new version of iTunes, version 7.4, is a ringtone creation feature. The feature allows iPhone users to create 30-second ringtones from songs bought from the iTunes Store. About 500,000 of the 6 million songs on iTunes are signed up to be 'ringtonable', but more will follow. It costs 99 cents (that's 79p in Apple-conversion) to make a ringtone and various options and professional touches will be at your disposal to create a great custom ringtone. But yes, you're paying twice to make music you already own into a ringtone.

The iPhone's 4GB version is also being dropped. Oh well.

Another curious anouncement concerns Apple's new partnership with Starbucks. When in range of a Starbucks Wi-Fi hotspot, a new button pops up on the iPod touch and on the iPhone allowing users to browse the iTunes Store, check out the songs playing in that Starbucks and buy the songs if they like them. The idea is that the service will be used as a "music discovery system". Joined on the Apple conference stage was Starbucks chairman Howard Schultz, who said that this was an exciting venture, and commented that discovering new music via radio was now "really hard". Fair dos.

The Starbucks service is only in the US for now, and will take until 2009 to become ubiquitous across the States. Do we in Britain care? This reporter thinks not.