Although iTunes Plus has been available for some time worldwide, only a limited number of the 10 million songs were available in this format. A high percentage were still DRM only. The news is that today 80% of the total are now available as iTunes Plus, and this will change to 100% (or near abouts) by March. So it is essentially the end of DRM for downloadable music. That is news.

I can't imagine there being any level of difficulty in transferring iTunes Plus (AAC) to a Nokia handset. Doesn't the memory card show up as a mass storage device where you simply drag and drop MP3/AAC files to/from?

It's that easy with Sony Ericsson phones and I can't imagine there any difference between SE and Nokia's. True, though - the Nokia Suite sucks (as does the generic SE suite too). But programs like MyPhoneExplorer are there to make up for that, brilliant piece of (freeware) software I recommend to anyone with an SE phone.

Apple has always had a published API offering complete iTunes device integration availble for free.

The API has been there since before the iPod.

Like the other poster, iTunes Plus has been in the US since Feb 6, 2007. As long as you owned a music player that could handle MPEG-4 Audio (.MP4, .M4A, or AAC, your pick), you could buy Plus music on iTunes and play it on those players.

This "new" announcement must be meant for some territory that Plus hasn't existed; for all I can see the specs are the same as it was when it was first introduced here.

What would actually be news is if iTunes supported 3rd party hardware.

While some other services have been offering DRM-free songs from the majors for a while, none of them has shown that people are interested in leaving iTunes on a measurable scale. All that's happened during that time, is that some other music services have gone belly up, so these services such as Amazon has gotten their customers from them, not from itunes. Amazon, for example, grew quickly, then stopped at about 8%, and hasn't shown a percentage growth for months.

But this will bring more customers TO iTunes, despite the small number of "I hate anything Apple" people out their.

It's not Apple's problem as to how customers get their songs on to their own non Apple products. Apple has done their part now, even though the music companies have squeezed out higher prices for hits.

With Fairplay out of the way, it's now up to others to do what has to be done to get iTunes bought files to other machines.

This has been available for well over a year ! lol