"Japan's three major mobile phone carriers KDDI, Vodafone and NTT DoCoMo have all flagged new models boasting about 2 megapixels.This article states that 'the designs offer more than merely a few more pixels, though. Models of KDDI and Vodafone also come with auto-focus (AF) mechanisms, for example. Some camera-equipped mobile phones are featuring the equivalent electronic flash found in digital still cameras'. With the capacity of two megapixels and flash, 'photography with mobile phones will make major inroads into digital camera territory'.
Mobile Phones Enter 2-Mpixel Era" [Smart Mobs]

Did I really say I wanted a phone with a 1-megapixel camera? Scratch that. I guess if I just wait a year, they'll hit U.S. shores with 3+ megapixels!

iTunes Music Store RSS Generator

"I learned from Bill Bumgarner that the iTunes Music Store now has RSS feeds.I'll withhold comment on...." [More Like This WebLog]

This is the kind of thing I've been waiting for from Apple. They've got a good community built up around iTunes, but they've done a poor job of connecting and exposing it. I'll have to play around with this to see what it really means, but it would be great if I could find iTunes users with similar tastes in music and then subscribe to their feeds.

On a side note, here's yet another reason for full RSS feeds. I can't get to the More Like This site right now, which means I can't read the rest of the post OR get to the link. Incredibly frustrating.

Update: So now the iTunes RSS Generator is everywhere, and I've gotten the URL from various places and subscribed to two feeds, one for new releases and one for featured & exclusive albums. The generator is very nice, letting you choose genres and then generating the RSS URL on the fly. I very much expect this type of added value service from Apple, and I wish other sites would take a queue and make it this easy for users to create customized feeds.

But I also expect at least two RSS buttons next to every artist's name. I want to grab a feed for every artist I want to track plus one for music bought by listeners who also purchased a specific album. Then there's the really out-of-the-box community, user-based recommendations that I want.

I want Apple to work with Art of the Mix and show me songs other people have mixed with the one I just bought. I want to see which Live365 and Shoutcast stations play the song I just bought. I want to know if it's been mashed with another song. I want it to be like MoodLogic and recommend similar types of songs to create an ambience.

And I want to build all of this into a feed generated on the fly. I know, I know, but I can dream, can't I?