Apple may have blazed a trail in the world of digital music players for
the past few years, but in the flash player stakes it's beginning to
fall behind the competition. Not in the number of players it sells, or
the amount of legal music downloads its customers enjoy, but in what
it's managing to fit into its smaller players.

It still insists on not squeezing a screen onto its shuffle while other
manufacturers' tiny players are building them in. And its latest nano,
despite much of the competition incorporating video playback features as
standard, is still sticking to its music-only philosophy, even though it
has a lovely colour screen.