Gizmodo's top stories of the day—so far.
•Groping the Motorizr Z6 Slider
•The World's Sweetest Boothbabe
•Five Sweet Phones We Found (That Aren't The iPhone)
•Wild Charge Hands-On: Really Does Charge Wirelessly
•Three Stylish PCs Mac-Haters Can Brag About
•Sharp Rolls Out Gigantic 108-Inch LCD
•It's So Zunely at CES

Maybe the boys at Redmond knew what was coming today cause they've decided to ramp up their Zune with games. Microsoft wouldn't say what type of games the Zune will be able to play (Doom? Rad Racer? Bejeweled?), but it's obviously a move to catch up with Apple. The downside, you'll have to wait till July 2008 before you can play them. – Louis Ramirez
Microsoft Will Add Video Games to Zune [Bloomberg]

Follow the entire Jobs Keynote on this dedicated keynote page.
9:15: Steve's talking about the transition to Intel within 7 months instead of 12. Praising third party app developers and users. "As soon as you saw these lightning fast machines, you bought'em".
9:17: Half of all new mac sales are to "switchers".
9:17: An Apple "switch" ad for Vista is being played. Hodgman is in hospital gown in preparation for the Vista installation—worried about what happens when they "fiddle with his insides". Hoo, snarky.
9:20: Brag-time again. 2 billion songs have been sold (1b to 2b in 10 months in 2006). 5 million every day.
9:21: Apple's now the #4 seller of music. Also, 50 million TV shows sold. 1.3 million movies sold.
9:22: Paramount's releasing its movies on the Apple store now. All old movies, including "all six Star Trek movies".
9:23: In November, the Zune had 2% and Apple had 62%. December stats aren't out yet....

Filed under: Gaming, Handhelds

Microsoft's Peter Moore, chief Xbox-exec and avid bicep tattooer, confirmed a plan to add video games to the Zune (Xune?) at CES yesterday. This would bring the Zune up to speed with the iPod's ability to offer games, albeit several months late. Moore said the Zune's large screen would provide a better platform for handheld gaming, gushing, "I love the interface, I love the screen." We know you do, Peter. We know you do. While this isn't quite what we were thinking when pondering a Microsoft-branded handheld gaming system, everyone's gotta start somewhere (we're looking at you, Zune). Of course, Peter Moore -- perhaps prematurely -- told BusinessWeek last year, "It can't just be our version of the iPod ... in addition to playing music and videos, a Microsoft device would include games." And now it will ... err, rather, it will in about eighteen months.

[Via ZuneBoards] 
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So, to keep things less inflamatory, let's talk about the trends in the digital download market overall, and why it matters (even if not to Apple) if the digital download market is slowing down.

Take a look at the trends in this market here. All the excitement and press around digital downloads is swept aside by the simple stat that wile digital sold $500M in songs in 2005, the rest of the market (CDs, etc...) sold $11.2B (but those sales are dropping). That's something like 9 Billion tracks per year - if there are 100M music buyer in the US, it's 87 tracks per year, 7 per month!

The key question for the industry is whether digital can grow enough to add to or replace lost physical sales. We get an initial indication here: the growth in digital from 2004 to 2005 (corrected) didn't offset the drop in physical sales.

All the discussion below is around which of these two scenarios will play out.
Digital takes off! iPods and Zunes sell into as ...

Things are heating up again post holiday - for CES Microsoft has a nice presence and lots of announcements, and I suspect Apple will give us something to think about at Macworld. I'll try to post during this period, but will be traveling and doing internal intelligence on both so may be a bit slammed.

For the record, I'm betting on the following for Macworld:
Mac and iPod momentum announcements (with or without snarky Zune sound bite) OS X Leopard preview and launch date announcements iLife 07 iTV announcement and demo, but not available until Feb or March Maybe...maybe...the Apple phone. The latter is most iffy - the noise and rumors are huge, but there's no way to tell the signal from the noise at this point. I'll revisit my accuracy after the event.

Paul Thurrott over at the Internet Nexus reports on the apparent shut-down of Virgin Music downloads in the US. Apparently they've struck a deal to hand off their music subscription customers to Napster.

This highlights what's likely to be a trend - there's not really any profit in running a standalone music service (Apple and Zune are likely to make the money from hardware sales, not from service fees), so the standalone guys are left with a real challenge. Expect to see more consolidations, shut-downs, and outright acquisitions in this space over the next 12 months.

9:25
Macworld Keynote 2007 [Gizmodo]
Macworld Keynote 2007: Chronological order [Gizmodo]

Even at an event so PC-nerd friendly as CES, we still can't find Zune friends. This is what happened when we looked for a buddy in the press room. – Jason Chen
Zune [Gizmodo]
CES [Gizmodo]

Surprise surprise, the Zune is at CES ( Consumer Electronic Show) in Las Vegas. Its a great show and if you are lucky enough to go, you are sure to see many new and exciting new products coming out, not just for the Zune but every thing from TV’s to cameras. There will be however [...]