I guess those with an Apple "lifestyle" have much to cheer after last week's power announcements about all the new products it is launching or are in the pipeline. The most significant was the 75 movies from Walt Disney Pictures, Pixar, Touchstone Pictures and Miramax Films. Just as the iPod made the breakthrough for online music sales, this move by Apple will blow the old rental model of the film industry right out of the water. Apple is hoping it will do for the film industry what it has done for the music industry with its iTunes online store (www.itunes.com), formerly known as the iTunes Music Store. In addition to the films the store also offers downloads of popular television series. It's not only music on the go, but portable video for those on the move.

The movies take up between one and two gigabytes of hard drive space and can be downloaded in 60 to 90 minutes on broadband, Apple says. To complement its foray into the movie business Apple plans to release what it is branding as an iTV player, a wireless device that allows the downloaded films to be played on a television. For now the movies can be played on a home computer, either with an Mac or a Windows operating system, in addition to the company's trend setting iPod player. The company's three iPod models already hold a 75 per cent share of all music player sales. They are the iPod shuffle, which doesn't come with a screen, the iPod Nano, and the full version iPod, which holds up to 80 gigabytes of video or music and has a battery life of 24 hours.

Notice the battery life. This is also an Apple breakthrough, as important perhaps as the push into industry.

Watching movies on a 2.5-inch colour screen might not be everyone's thought of a good time, but I am betting we will soon see people walking around armed with a pocketful of movies they want to see during their idle moments. Talk about personal home video. This is as individual as it gets!

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I was eating on the terrace of a fairly decent restaurant last Saturday, next to a boisterous table of about ten other diners. During the start of the evening one of the women at the table received a phone call. She broke off conversation, answered, and left to talk for about five minutes in the corner. Nothing extraordinary, except she did it about three times during the evening with her friends.

She is probably what researchers at the University of Staffordshire would call a "mobile phone addict".

The researchers found that people are becoming addicted to mobile phones, causing them to become stressed and irritable. They surveyed 106 student mobile phone owners and found that 16 percent were found to have problem behaviour linked to using their phone.

Mobile phone addicts either lied about how much they used them, become irritable after using them or were overly pre-occupied with them. They followed up the survey with tests on 20 mobile phone users before and while giving up their mobile phones. The tests showed that blood pressure was lower when talking about mobile phones than before they gave up the devices.

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A Consumer Reports investigation points out a privacy trend that this column has been warning about for a long time. It seems that almost every bit of technology now whittles away at our privacy, a trend we must be careful about while exploiting the full benefits of innovation.

Consumer Reports warns that the practices of commercial data brokers can rob consumers of their privacy, threaten them with identity theft and profile them as dead beats or security risks. The consumer organisation's October issue finds that Choice Point, LexisNexis and Acxiom are among the largest of the horde of data brokers that generate billions of dollars in revenue by selling sensitive and personal information, sometimes including to crooks.

The magazine's three-month investigation concluded that current federal laws do not adequately safeguard sensitive information, which is often collected and sold by data brokers. The information can include Social Security Numbers, phone numbers, credit card numbers, information about an individual's prescription medication, shopping habits, political affiliations and sexual orientations.

There is no way an individual can find out exactly what data collectors are telling others, and the accuracy of that data is rarely verified, the magazine found.

When CR staffers asked to see their own files, they received scant information. One report contained about 31 errors. The complete report on how you can limit the damage is available by visiting www.ConsumerReports.org.

Contact Ahmed at elamin.ahmedgmail.com