New 'Tunes

Further fuelling speculation that Apple is planning to open an online movie store in the near future, the latest update to iTunes brings to the fore its existing ability to play video. A small number of songs and albums now have exclusive videos bundled with the music when bought.

Previous versions of iTunes could be used to play pop videos clips from the iTunes Store but this added-value bundling - perhaps to compensate for the less tangible nature of digital music - hints at Apple's greater ambition on the movie front. The purchase mechanism is already built into iTunes - so can it be long before we see films for sale by Apple?

This new version 4.8 also includes some security fixes and a couple of new features to make contact and calendar synchronisation with iPods easier.