Apple sprouts new iPods. Bloomberg Boot Camp, a report on today's technology. They have become the top selling digital music player worldwide... with a market share of better than 30 percent. Competitors have built hard drive based music players that are cheaper and have better battery life, but no one has been able to come up with a design and the coolness factor of Apple's iPod. Worldwide product manager Danika Cleary says the latest introduction is the iPod mini... a smaller four gigabyte model that comes in five different colors. It will sell for about 250 dollars...

"The iPod Mini is targeted at customers today who are buying flash based players because they are looking for something that's incredibly portable and still holds a decent amount of music. The value that the iPod Mini brings to those customers is that it's as small as those products... being about the size of a business card and no heavier than a men's watch... but it offers 16 times the capacity holding a thousand songs. At 249, you can compare that to a flash player that holds maybe 60 songs, a 256 meg flash player, at 199. So the value for the customer is really in a similar size package, you get much, much more music."

Apple's iTunes music store, which now claims a market share of about 70 percent... is helping to sell more iPods. It's the only portable player that works with iTunes. Apple's success has made a fan out of one of its rivals... Hewlett Packard. More on that, in an upcoming report. Bloomberg Boot Camp, I'm Fred Fishkin.