Apple's iTunes launch in London may have hogged the headlines but there were a couple of other very significant technology announcements made last week, both of which may play a huge part in the development of the mobile phone and the digital music player.
Over in Japan, JP Morgan analyst Kazuyo Katsuma confirmed what industry insiders had known for months, that the first phone with integrated hard disk storage was on its way.
Meanwhile in Helsinki Nokia announced it was testing fuel cells powered by tiny hydrogen-based energy sources. The company claimed the cells could triple the life of existing mobile phone batteries.
While mobile phone handsets have travelled a huge distance in the last three or four years, manufacturers have yet to address the two core issues preventing phones from becoming the über-gadget of the decade: storage and power consumption.
The arrival of hard disk storage on mobile phones is very significant. Until recently it was widely expected that flash memory cards such as the Secure Digital and Memory Stick would deliver the storage phone users needed to house music, image and video content. Yet the arrival of high-capacity (512 megabyte/one gigabyte and beyond) cards has been painfully slow, and their prices have remained high.
By contrast, hard disks have shrunk to the point where the leading manufacturers Seagate, Hitachi and Toshiba have models smaller than an inch that are capable of storing many gigabytes.
The arrival of hard disk phones in the UK, which will probably happen at the end of next year, could be particularly bad news for the makers of digital audio players: the Americans may have a slightly different view, but Europeans seem to prefer to carry just one gadget rather than fill their pockets with devices. In short, why lug an iPod around when you have a phone that can store as much music, features a superior screen and also allows you to take pictures, shoot videos and even make voice calls?
For the Japanese, the main driver for adding hard disk to handsets is TV. Over the past year several manufacturers in both Japan and Korea have unveiled sets that tune into analogue TV stations. By factoring in hard disks, users will now also be able to view programmes they recorded at home as well as access Sky Plus-type functions, such as pausing live TV when the phone rings.
And it is not only Japan that will be watching TV footage on mobiles. Mario Rivas, the executive vice-president of Philips Semiconductors' communications group, told Guardian Unlimited tuners integrated into handsets would be a common feature on phones next year.
In Helsinki this week Nokia screened TV over a variant of the digital terrestrial TV standard, DVB-H. The company first indicated its commitment to delivering content of this sort when it announced the 7700 handset in Autumn 2003.
DVB-H is ideally suited for handheld devices with smaller screens and lower battery power.
There are two other major hurdles for phone manufacturers to overcome before the TV phone comes of age: the size of the screen and battery power.
Even the largest screens on mobile phones, such as the Sharp TM100 and Sony Ericsson P900, are too small to deliver a picture users will want to view for more than couple of minutes. So phone makers are banking on new technologies delivering fold-up screens that could in theory be much larger than existing LCDs.
Another possibility would be to separate the screen from the mobile phone, thereby creating miniature projection devices. Several years ago manufacturers showed prototypes illustrating how this might work, including an innovative but perhaps a little too left-field concept from the UK's own Psion.
As for battery life, the announcement by Nokia in Finland is certainly a step forward. It is, however, just the tip of the iceberg, for every major consumer electronics player from Toshiba to Motorola is pursuing alternative power- enhancing technologies.
Just a few years ago accessing a news story with a few lines of text via the internet on a mobile was seen as significant achievement; now Nokia, like several of its rivals, boasts that the mobile phone will kill off low-end digital cameras and PDAs and all but see off the music player. After this week there at last appears to be a degree of substance to its claims.
