Leader: iPod as storage cure-all

With Napster's recent revamp and Sony's poker-chip music-player launch, weak-stomached analysts have been getting the jitters and proclaiming that Apple's sky is teetering on the verge of falling in.

Is it really? Of course not. The music player market, as borne out by new statistics, is set for ripe growth in the coming months. Will more and more new shoppers turn to Sony, Creative et al? Of course - but there's more than enough expanding market to go around. Steve Jobs needn't be going that little bit greyer over iPod competition for a while yet.

Still, while the bandwagon jumpers are hoping to share in some of that Apple-style cool, it seems the Apple ecosystem is getting ready to turn the iPod into the business tool du jour.

Beneath the teen-centric, volume-heavy, oh-so-cool veneer of the music player beats the heart of a storage-strapped IT manager's dream.

The latest converts to the iPod-as-portable-storage gang are the UK police and military, one software maker revealed to silicon.com recently, with the lure of secure portable storage in a user-friendly format proving tempting for the boys in blue.

The iPod's storage capacity also numbers radiologists among its unlikely fans, with Dr Osman Ratib, who developed a whole new medical imaging technology based around Mac OS X and using the iPod to store X-rays.

As Dr Ratib told silicon.com at the time: "It's amazing - [with iPods] people are carrying around 60GB in their pocket when I don't even have 60GB on my computer."

Businesses have been quick to cash in on the storage potential, offering text guides on everything from Irish pubs to London loos for iPods.

Perhaps the biggest fans of the iPod's storage capacity, however, are students - but not just for playing tunes. One university has gone as far as to give away iPods to one incoming group of first years, who have since used the devices to store a variety of educational resources, as well as doubtless the entire Jimi Hendrix back catalogue.

Selling the iPod as a storage device could prove a lucrative way to build market share among the university-going population - what parent could refuse their child's request for some vital portable storage to keep their award-winning dissertations safe as they move from PC to PC around the university computer room? Whether they need to know that that self-same portable storage comes with white ear-buds is another matter.

It's easy to look at an iPod and think the storage possibilities are just a handy sideline for what is essentially a music player business but when you take into account that an iPod photo has more memory than a Mac mini's hard drive, you can begin to see why so many individuals and companies are so keen to tap its potential.