That was the message from Apple top man Steve Jobs as he announced two new iPod products.

To no one’s surprise, one of those new products is the iPhone, which can hold about 100 songs. For weeks industry watchers had been predicting that Apple would roll out such a product, and Mr. Jobs did not prove them wrong.

The iPhone, dubbed the “ROKR” by its manufacturer, Motorola, relies on flash memory for storage, and can be used with Cingular Wireless. Jobs described the iPhone as an “… iPod Shuffle right on your phone.”

However, it was the other new gizmo that caught some people off guard. Called the iPod Nano, it’s a pencil-thin device designed to replace the iPod Mini, and can store music, games, photos and a calendar. Like the new iPhone, as well as the iPod Shuffle, the Nano utilizes flash memory for storage and comes in two storage capacities: a four-gig Nano, which can hold about 1,000 songs, and a two-gigger capable of storing about 200 songs. Prices are $249 and $199, respectively.

Nasdaq players welcomed the new iPods. On the day of the announcements shares of Apple rose 21 cents to $49.01 during afternoon trading. Meanwhile, Motorola’s stock gained 9 cents on the New York Stock Exchange to close at $22.50.

The new products represent Apple’s commitment to remain king of the personal music player hill. While the iPod is still the dominant device with more than 22 million sold within the last two years, other companies have been making headway towards taking a bite out of Apple’s pie. Although the full-size iPods capable of holding thousands upon thousands of songs are certainly attractive to music buffs, the smaller iPods are designed for folks who just want to take a few hundred tunes to the gym. Or make a phone call. Or both.

But Apple had more than just phones and Nanos on its mind when it announced the new iPods. The Cupertino company also announced that it had signed four automobile manufacturers to integrate iPods into their 2006 models.

Acura, Audi, Honda and Volkswagen all agreed to incorporate iPod compatibility into next year’s models, with Acura and Honda being the first to include text-to-speech capabilities, or VoiceId, which will be used for searching songs, artists and playlists in models that will appear on dealers’ lots before the end of this year.

“We’re thrilled to team up with Acura, Audi, Honda and Volkswagen to provide drivers with a seamless iPod experience,” Apple’s VP of Worldwide iPod Product Marketing, Greg Joswiak, said in a statement announcing the automotive deal. “Car companies are embracing the iPod integration in the majority of their lineup beginning later this year.”

Almost lost in the media’s coverage of Steve Jobs hawking the new iPods was Sony’s announcement that it will release an updated version of the company’s line of Walkman digital music players.

According to Reuters, Sony will introduce two hard disk models, a 20-gig player as well as a 6-gig unit. The company will also introduce three flash-based models.

Sony first introduced the concept of personal players more than 20 years ago when it first rolled out the Walkman line, it hasn’t had similar success with its digital players.

When Sony first introduced the Walkman digital line, it tried to duplicate Apple’s success by recreating a player/online music store package. However, like the iPod, the only proprietary format the first Sony digital players could handle was Sony’s digital rights management format – a spec that didn’t exactly have customers flocking to Sony in droves, eventually causing the company to open its players to other formats.

However, Sony’s pairing of a music store with a proprietary player did take off in Japan, where the company grabbed 27 percent of the local market for flash-based players in May and June. But that was before Apple recently introduced iTunes in that country.

But Sony thinks it can hold its market position in Japan, and close the gap between itself and Apple on the worldwide market by adding advanced features to its players. Sony’s latest models will track and play the songs users listen to most. Plus, there’s a “time machine shuffle” feature that allows users to pick songs released during a specific year.

All in all, Sony hopes to sell about 4.5 million players, both hard drive and flash based, in the year up to next March: a goal that will definitely be an improvement over the 850,000 units sold one year earlier.

It looks as if the Australian recording industry is in prime position to start squeezing the Sharman.

That’s because an Australian federal court ruled that Sharman Networks’ popular file-sharing software, Kazaa, infringes on copyright, and gave the company two months to clean up its act and stop the infringing insanity.

Federal court judge Murray Wilcox ruled that Sharman, as well as other Kazaa distributors, did not take any action to stop the infringing activities of Kazaa users other than posting notices on the Kazaa Web site advising users not to trade in copyrighted works.

According to Wilcox, it was in the financial interest of Sharman and its partners to “maximize, not minimize, music file-sharing.”

But unlike similar U.S. rulings, under Australian law, the record labels could go after not only the companies behind file-sharing, but the companies’ executive officers and partners as well. For Sharman, that meant a guilty verdict for the company’s chief exec, Nikki Hemming, as well as a guilty decree for Altnet, a Sharman partner which distributes its own sharing software piggybacked upon the Kazaa P2P client.

So far, all those found guilty have been ordered to pay 90 percent of the recording industry’s costs in the case. However, a hearing to establish actual damages, which could total billions of dollars, has yet to take place.

Needless to say, Sharman is planning to appeal the verdict, and claims that its file-swapping software is no different than a tape recorder or photocopier.

But Wilcox said that if Sharman wants to stay in the file-sharing biz, it will have to devise a way to prevent the trading of unlicensed copyrighted material. Wilcox also said he did not want to hinder legitimate file-sharing, but that the company must make changes to prevent users from sharing copyrighted material.

The Australian verdict is the latest legal opinion regarding companies distributing P2P software. Last June, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed a lower court’s decision that P2P companies could not be held liable for their users’ actions, and ruled that copyright holders could sue P2P companies for encouraging users to trade copyrighted material.

But is the legal action too late? Although Kazaa is still popular among file-traders, it’s not as big as it was a couple of years ago. Other technologies, specifically BitTorrent, which enables users to receive chunks of a file from several sources at once, have risen in popularity over the last two years.

However, according to Sharman, more than 800,000 people downloaded the Kazaa software the week before the court’s decision – a figure that’s sure to be mentioned when the record labels go back to court to seek damages.