iLounge

NPR has posted a beta version of its new podcast directory. It is currently offering 130 podcasts in numerous categories and topics.

Brad Hale, director of product marketing for MP3 chip maker SigmaTel, says music phones will only whet the public’s appetite for full-featured digital music players. “When there are MP3 capabilities in a phone, it’s going to expose the technology to someone that’s a non-MP3 user and it’s going to cause more and more people to want to adopt stand-alone MP3 players. At the end of the day the phone is not an optimal solution from an audio quality standpoint, from a battery life standpoint, from a user interface standpoint, from a storage capacity standpoint.”

Greenhouse, a Japanese electronics maker, has created an amplifier and speaker dock for the iPod shuffle looks “suspiciously like a Bose SoundDock.”

Creative has confirmed that 3,700 of the company’s Zen Neeon MP3 players that shipped from a company factory in late July contain a Windows worm (W32.Wullik.B).

TheStreet.com’s Cody Willard says a video iPod is still a ways off. “While there are millions of video files being traded on piracy networks and sent via email, and hundreds of millions of videos available for download on the Internet, the mainstream user isn’t exactly downloading those files, burning DVDs from those video files and watching them on a TV set. That day is coming, and Apple is certainly going to make a move into that market when the time is right. But that’s not next week. And probably not anytime in the next quarter, or two or three.”