It had to happen, as all good things do eventually come to an end. As with eight-track and cassette tapes, the technologically superior CD player is on the brink of extinction due to the emergence of the MP3 player.

Compact discs will be no more, and it’s the car stereo manufacturers that have realised this. They’ve started to create and market units that spell the end for the humble CD, casting into the downward spiral that leads only to the car boot sale.

US manufacturer Blaupunkt has just announced a new, second generation, model that costs $160 and comes without a CD player. Instead of the slot for your compact discs it features a selection of ports for a variety of MP3 player devices, such as the Apple iPod and other USB devices and memory cards.

Other manufactures also have car stereo units that have dropped the CD player functionality from their products.

Ben Oh, editor of Car Audio & ElectronicsMagazine says:

We’re very close to an age when we’re not going to have to carry around a bunch of discs anymore, units are starting to gain some popularity.

If you’ve paid your own money for a CD album of one of your favourite artists, should you have the right to put that album onto your MP3 player? After all, you’ve paid the fee; you’ve given the artist your money and bought the album legally. If you want to listen to it on a CD player, an MP3 player or even a cassette player, you should be able to.

It’s not fair that you’d be expected to buy the album again, on every format available to you. The UK music industry doesn’t agree though. It’s not happy that UK consumers can purchase music on CD, and then copy the music they have paid for onto their MP3 players.

The UK Government has proposed that it be made legal to transfer music onto you iPod or MP3 player without any kind of levy, or tax. The UK music industry disagrees.

We acknowledge that consumers clearly want to format shift and also place enormous value on the transferability of music. Music fans clearly deserve legal clarity in this area as well as the freedom to enjoy any music they have legitimately obtained.

What the UK music industry would like to see is a tax on MP3 players and iPods when consumers purchase them, knowing that they will be used to copy music at some point.

This is actually quite common as many European countries actually charge a levy on blank media, which acts as compensation.

As if the constant stream of gadget orientated television shows and wave of TV advertising wasn’t enough to demonstrate the UK’s fascination with mobile gadgetry and technology, recent research has just confirmed the fact.

Energizer, the company behind the batteries and the oh so lovable Energizer Bunny, has commissioned the research that reveals a third of the UK considers a mobile phone to be something allows them to be contacted 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

20% of all of those questioned said they needed their mobile devices to keep in contact with loved ones as they were away from home all day.

Staggeringly over 50% of those who responded said they wouldn’t go anywhere without their MP3 player, which includes iPods and MP3 enabled mobile phones.

The fascination with mobile devices doesn’t just extend to the youth of the Country either, a third of people over 55 also confessed to being unable to live without their portable gadgetry.

A spokesman for Energizer said:

Our research shows that Britain is ‘always on’.

No matter where we go we just can’t leave home without our mobiles, cameras, PDAs, MP3s and games players. We are so used to having gadgets at our side that we accept that we are contactable 24/7.

iTunes has dominated the MP3 music download market for some time now, and has yet to face a serious competitor. Online retail giant Amazon have recently entered the market, closely followed by high street retailers from both sides of the pond; namely Walmart and Tesco.

Whether they can threaten the strangle hold Steve Jobs and Apple have on the MP3 download arena is another matter. However now one of the major online social networking sites has thrown its hat into the arena to cut itself a piece of the very expensive pie.

Backed by Rupert Murdock’s News Corp., MySpace has teamed up with up music giants Sony BMG, Universal Music and Warner Music Group to offer its users a service to make Apple think twice about the safety of their position.

MySpace will be offering paid music downloads in a variety of file formats, making their offerings available to both iPods and conventional MP3 players. They will also be offering some free music downloads, as well as some other services to be revealed.

Backed by three of the music industry’s heavyweights you can expect MySpace to put in a serious challenge to iTunes’ dominance, and to have Steve Jobs looking over his shoulder at the massively popular social networking website.

The Germans are looking to dominate Europe once again, only this time it’s not through a sneaky attack on Blighty. The kind of dominance they’re after now concerns the UK and European MP3 player market, and to help them in their venture they’ve enlisted some of the finest minds in Cambridge.

TrekStor are a multimedia and digital specialist who outsell the Apple iPod in Germany with their range of MP3 players, and they’ve setup a research and development department with the Cambridge egg-heads with a view to discovering a technology that they believe will replace MP3 entirely.

TrekStor are hoping to launch in the UK in May and have set their sites on becoming the third largest UK supplier of MP3 players within seven months, just in time for Christmas.

They currently see their biggest threat to be the ever evolving mobile phone, as MP3 players look to be severely threatened by the more versatile phone/camera/MP3 player combinations.

TrekStor’s chief executive Shimon Szmigiel said:

The whole MP3 market is slowing down. There has been little innovation in MP3s over the last couple of years and we are not fully focused on them, it’s an exchangeable market. The innovation focus is now based on different mobile solutions.

With the recent news that a Scottish boffin had come up with a new memory system that could revolutionise the portable storage industry, and offer MP3 players up to 150 times their current memory, IBM have revealed they’re looking at new development technologies as well.

It has often been thought that flash memory devices could replace hard drives completely once the price of flash memory falls to a competitive level. IBM however say that can beat the flash memory for storage, predicting a new technology entirely inside the next ten years.

Their new invention is said to be named ‘Racetrack memory’, and they’re claiming it will be extremely stable yet have lightening fast load times.

The new system is said to work using something called ‘Spintronics’, which means it stores its data via the spin of electrons, instead of the electronic charge which flash memory uses.

IBM says the real advantage with their new technology is that it has no wear-out mechanism, so it can be used, re-used and used again without ever wearing out. Flash drives will eventually wear out after a thousand or so rewrites.

IBM say the storage capacity of Racetrack will allow MP3 players to store up to 500,000 tracks or 3,500 movies. That’s half a million songs, on a portable MP3 player!

In addition to the increased storage IBM claim they can run on just a single battery for weeks, which might spell bad news for companies such as Energizer and Duracell.

There is still way to go before we’re likely to see this technology in the shops though as IBM say they’re looking at sometime within the next decade.

Gone are the days when students use their MP3 players and iPods in classes to mask out the sound of a particularly boring lecture on the films of Jean Luc Godard. These days students use their portable music players more productively, and to aid their studies.

Oxford University Press has launched language downloads in MP3 format to aid students in their courses, helping them with the learning of the langauge and pronunciation, wherever they are at the time.

Originally available as CD books, the products have been redesigned to make them more accessible, more travel friendly and to have less impact on the environment. The packaging required for MP3 downloads is considerably less than that required for CD audio books!

The nine language courses available are Italian, French, Spanish, Latin American Spanish, Japanese, Greek, Russian, German and Portuguese.

The sets contain access cards that students can use to access a website and download the MP3 files direct. They contain the same material that was available on the CDs, which is approximately four hours of material.

Oxford University Press’ dictionary publishing manager, Judy Pearsall, said:

Flexibility of learning has been key to the success of our Take Off In courses, and offering MP3 for the full course is the obvious next step. OUP is the first major publisher in the UK to offer the full audio content of a language-learning course as an MP3 download, which is fantastic news for today’s mobile generation.

No need to get out of bed for those early morning lectures…just download the podcast!

Long gone are the days when a student’s sole research method was a trip to the library for hours of searching through dusty old bookshelves.

Education is changing at a tremendous rate. Technological advances mean that learning has evolved, and students in 2008 have a variety of learning resources available to them; email contact with lecturers, online articles, video conferencing and of course the odd dusty old book.

But it is podcasts that have most dramatically changed the way we learn, especially in the department of modern languages. Students of languages are being actively encouraged by their institutions to download and listen to podcasts in order to improve their pronunciation and listening comprehension. For example, the site ‘Deutsche Welle‘, Germany’s international news broadcaster, offers podcasts for students of German as a foreign language. The podcasts are free and are downloaded automatically onto your MP3 player. The topics covered are interesting and engaging for language learners of all ages.

The trend, which began in colleges in the United States, is becoming increasingly popular this side of the pond. The BBC has reported that ‘South Kent College in Dover has spent £25,000 on Nano iPods for 250 students’, so that the students can catch up on missed lectures. Some claim that initiatives such as these are a waste of tax payer’s money and a form of bribery, whilst others believe that it is important to find new and exciting ways of encouraging young people to learn.

Whatever your opinion, the fact is, learning has evolved due to our ever-increasing dependence on technology.

To offset a previous article, which claimed that an MP3 player could be better than a girlfriend, here is proof that girls are better off with an MP3 player rather than a man!

1. Get the girls round, crack open a few bottles of wine and set your MP3 player to the Bridget Jones’ soundtrack…let the singing commence!
2. You can change the style of your MP3 player easily, whereas it is much harder to change that of your man!
3. Let your MP3 player accompany you on a shopping trip, it will not loiter outside the shop, it will not constantly ask you if you have finished yet, and it will not be on the lookout for the nearest pub!
4. Relax in the tub listening to some tunes on your waterproof MP3 player. It will not leave wet towels and dirty underpants on the bathroom floor.
5. When out with your MP3 player its eyes will not wander and gaze at other women’s behinds! Your MP3 player only has eyes for you, partly because you control everything it does! J
6. It doesn’t matter if your parents don’t like your MP3 player.
7. “I always know where my MP3 player is and I can control its actions. This can unfortunately not be said for my man!” (Mary, 26 years old, converted to MP3ism 3 months ago.)
8. Your MP3 player is clean, organised, sleek and stylish. Can the same be said about your man?
9. Listening to your MP3 player whilst driving is much better than having a man in the passenger seat. It will not tell you how to drive or park and does not take up valuable oxygen in the car.
10. Have they invented a vibrating MP3 player yet? They should.

If ever you needed a reason to buy an MP3 player, surely this is it. Studies have shown that using an MP3 player, and listening to the right sort of music, can actually help you win at Poker.

This isn’t some dodgy scam that will see you ‘asked to leave’ Vegas and then transported out into the desert either, this is based on pure emotional responses.

You’ve probably heard that certain types of music, namely rock, can make you drive your car more aggressively, whereas classic music can make you drive more economically. The same principal can be applied to playing poker.

As poker is a game filled with emotions, the emotional response one feels when listening to certain types of music has a direct connection to a player’s performance.

The connection is one that borders on hypnosis as music can have a very powerful effect on the human brain, such as helping sick people recover from illness and children battle their fears.

So if you’re planning a big poker game soon, or maybe a trip to Vegas, you might want to buy yourself an MP3 player first and fill it with the right sort of music. Music that calms you, promotes positive thought and helps your concentration.

It could be the difference between winning big and losing everything.