Japan's Buffalo has become the latest storage product provider to offer M-Systems' 16MB FlashDisc, an apparently "exciting" new take on the old USB Flash disk concept that packages the solid-state storage into a circular shell reminiscent of 1970s computer tapes.

TDK this week confirmed its plan to develop a Blu-ray Disc with a storage capacity of 200GB. If successful, the company's R&D effort will yield a disc with four times the capacity of today's biggest BDs and double the size of protoype next-generation BD-Rs TDK has already demo'd.

Sonos will this month cut the price of its multi-room digital music system. Its latest ZonePlayer wireless playback device, the ZP80, provides the same core functionality as Sonos' ZP100. However, to get the price - and the size - down, Sonos has stripped out the integrated amplifier used to drive speakers directly from the ZonePlayer.

Fujitsu has announced the world's third notebook to incorporate an HD DVD drive, following the lead set by Toshiba and, more recently, Acer. However, the 17in machine is not expected to appear until June.

Fujitsu will this month ship a monster high-definition PC-TV hybrid that incorporates not only four TV tuners - two for digital and two for analogue broadcasts - but also twin 300GB hard drives and a dual-layer enabled Blu-ray Disc recorder.

Napster will post a smaller loss for its fourth fiscal quarter than it previously forecast. The reason? Greater-than-expected subscriber growth has taken numbers paying for its music rental service to over 600,000.

Liteon will this month ship an external DVD writer that uses a slot-load mechanism rather than the more commonplace drawer system. The company is pitching the product at notebook users, though its slimline styling should appeal to desktop users too.

Sony this week unveiled a raft of DVD writers with built-in hard disk storage, two of which will also feature GemStar Guide Plus+ electronic programme guide (EPG). The five new models sport hard drives of between 80GB and 250GB unformatted storage capacity and DVD±R/RW drives with dual-layer support.

Five industry organisations are together calling on European states to abolish - or at least significantly reduce - "outdated" levies raised on digital media and devices to compensate copyright holders for losses they incur through unauthorised copying.

Modeo, the US company evangelising the DVB-H digital TV standard Stateside, is to offer a Windows Mobile 5-based smart phone capable of receiving and displaying such broadcasts. The handset, manufactured by Taiwan's HTC, will go on sale in the second half of the year, the company announced yesterday.

Apple vs Apple The Beatles' recording company, Apple Corp., was given an opportunity to object to Apple Comp.'s use of the apple logo in association with the iTunes Music Store. But it chose not to, the iPod maker's advocate claimed yesterday. Apple Corp. received an ITMS demo in January 2003 - four months before the service went live, Anthony Grabiner QC told the English High Court.

NEC today unveiled a 3.5in LCD it claims can reproduce colours "clearly and vividly" in brightly lit conditions. It does the trick by increasing the amount of light the display reflects back through its screen and also by boosting its luminance beyond that of any other panel of its kind.

Hitachi has unveiled a set of big-screen plasma and LCD TVs boasting not only four integrated tuners - two digital, two analogue - but also built-in hard disks with PVR functionality. The wonderfully named Wooo 9000 series contains six models offering 32in, 37in and 42in screen sizes.

Samsung has put back the release of its Blu-ray Disc player by a month, the company has revealed. However, in compensation, it has apparently upped the player's output to a maximum HD resolution of 1080p. The BD-P1000 will now ship on 25 June, not 23 May as originally planned.

Sony has signed bookstore Borders to sell its electronic book, the Reader, throughout the chain's 200 US shops. The consumer electronics giant said it would also offer the gadget in its 30-odd Sony Style outlets. Sony didn't say when the product will ship - it's already missed the March deadline it set when it announced the Reader last January.

US video rental companies Movielink and CinemaNow will today begin offering pay-to-own movie downloads from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment's Sony Pictures and MGM catalogues. Tomorrow, they will offer the first Sony title to be made simultaneously available in both DVD and download formats.

Gnarls Barkley track Crazy has become the first song to top the hit parade without a record being sold. The duo's melting pot brand of paranoid soul-pop hip-hop dance-slop shifted 31,000 legal downloads last week, and was crowned top of the pops by the Official UK Chart Company on Sunday. The CD hits shops today.

LG is suing rival South Korean consumer electronics giant Samsung for slander over a series of adverts which, it alleged, make false and defamatory claims about one of its top-of-the-range digital TV products.

Suddenly, all sorts of small companies are crawling out into the sunlight to tout alternative optical media technologies that will support HD content without the need to move from the current red-laser technology to tomorrow's blue-wavelength lasers.

Toshiba may be delaying the debut of its HD DVD player in the US, but it went ahead today with its Japanese launch. The company said it was bundling the machine (for a limited time) - the first commercially available HD DVD player - with a pair of HD DVD discs.