Apple to unveil the mother of all iPods?

Toshiba - the firm that supplies the hard drives for Apple's iPods - has announced it's planning a 50 per cent bigger drive and Apple has already put in an order for the devices.

The 1.8-inch drive that sits in the iPods will see a bigger brother in the next few months, although no launch date has been confirmed.

Cindy Lee, deputy manager of Toshiba Digital Media Network in Taiwan, said at the Computex trade fair that Toshiba have been giving potential customers sneaky peaks at the drives pre-launch.

The glimpse was obviously enough to get Apple slathering and Lee confirmed the company had put in an order for the drives, with rivals wanting to corner a slice of Apple's MP3 pie apparently also getting excited by the device.

The biggest iPod currently on the market packs 40GB and holds around 10,000 songs. The prospective mega-iPod will increase that by 50 per cent but if present trends in downloading continue, the storage might still not be enough to satisfy the music-mad UK public.

According to the latest figures from the British Phonographic Industry announced that according to its figures, legal downloads have topped the half million mark for the year to date.