When it was introduced last January, Apple originally proclaimed that the iPod's cheaper, svelter, more colorful sibling would ship "worldwide in April," which made the non-U.S. chunk of the world groan with impatience. Of course, the groans only got louder when April was just a week away and Apple pulled that ever-so-slick "Did we say April? We meant July" move... but now July is here, and when faithful viewer Norman Cho informed us that the Apple Store UK had gone offline last night (while the U.S. one had not), it wasn't a stretch to imagine what might be getting stocked on the virtual shelves back in Old Blighty.

Virtually stocked, anyway.

We suffered a mild aneurysm when the UK store came back online and still had no miniPods for sale, but eventually faithful viewer Small Paul reported that the goods had finally appeared on the shelves after all-- and so now miniPods are apparently available for preorder from Apple's various localized Apple Stores. The key word here is "preorder" (and the key prefix is "pre"), since according to Apple's press release non-U.S. miniPods won't actually start to ship for another fortnight or so, on the 24th. And actually, Apple qualifies things even further, stating only that the miniPod "is expected to be available... on July 24th." Expected. Given that supplies in the U.S. are still constrained, we wouldn't go betting the mortgage on that date, but in any case it's a whole heckuva lot better than hearing "Did we say July? We meant November."

By the way, UK 'Poddites, rejoice-- and not just because your day of minidom is reportedly at hand. Remember the flap that ensued when you all heard that Apple planned to sell miniPods for £199 in your neck of the woods? Today that amounts to roughly $369.58, for a 48% markup over Apple's $249 U.S. price. Well, a quick trip to the Apple Store UK reveals that Apple has instead set the price at £179, or roughly $332.43. Still sounds high? Well, that £179 includes VAT, your obscenely high tax; sans VAT, the price is £152.34, or $282.92-- not too much more than the U.S. price, which doesn't include our per-state sales tax. So there's been some improvement, at least. Plus you get free shipping, so hey.

Meanwhile, faithful viewer Jason Taylor confirms that, yes, the miniPod is now even available for preorder in Canada. And despite sharing a continent (not to mention a border) with Apple's home country, Canada's been stiffed on all sorts of seemingly obvious things like retail stores and the iTunes Music Store, so that's really saying something. Better still, the Canadian price is $349, which-- when you subtract out the $15 Blank Media Levy-- is only about four U.S. smackers more expensive than the home-turf price.

If miniPods can be preordered in both the UK and Canada, two countries notoriously snubbed by Apple in the past, you can probably rest assured that they're available in the rest of the world, too. Finally, pent-up demand will be satisfied and miniPods will take over the world... assuming Apple can ship more than six or eight of them per week, that is.

We should have guessed that Apple wasn't just going to smile politely through pursed lips on this one-- not with so much at stake. Remember last week when Sony introduced its idea of an "iPod-killer," the NW-HD1 Network Walkman? While there are at least as many reasons why it can't touch the iPod (ATRAC3, ATRAC3, and ATRAC3, among others) as reasons why Apple should worry (weight and battery life, anyone?), there's one alleged feature that probably had Sony taking a very, very long shower adding it to the marketing copy-- namely, the claim that the NW-HD1 holds 13,000 songs. It does, but only if said songs sound like crap. Basically, Sony's trying to hoodwink Joe Shmoe-- who presumably thinks a "bit rate" is something to do with the RPMs on his power drill-- by publishing a song capacity based on music encoded at 48 kbps, which no one would ever do under any circumstances ever ever ever.

So yes, Sony admits it's taking on the iPod with the NW-HD1, and its marketing spiel indeed claims that its player holds 13,000 songs compared to the iPod's 5,000-- despite the fact that the two players have the exact same capacity hard drives. And since Apple is really getting to like being the top dog in a given market for once, it's not planning to let these lies go unchallenged; the company issued a statement to the press (including the Wall Street Journal) noting that if the NW-HD1 carried music encoded at a bit rate that actual human beings would use and that wouldn't lead to listener sterility and blindness, it would only hold about 5,000 songs-- just like the 20 GB iPod. The disks are identical, so it's all down to simple math: same hard drive size + same music quality = same number of songs.

Of course, Apple couldn't resist taking a (rightly deserved) condescending little dig at the consumer electronics giant: "We're disappointed that Sony, which is new to this market, has decided to make their first impression by attempting to mislead the press and customers." Oooooo, burn.

But my oh my ain't this six minutes past rich: rather than go all sheepish like any self-respecting liar should when caught, "Sony reacted angrily to Apple's statement," and wait'll you hear why. It seems that Todd Schrader, Sony's veep of portable audio products, indignantly maintains that the "Walkman has always been about choice" and that "consumers can play songs on the Walkman in a variety of bit rates and that it is up to customers to decide the rate." Well, duh, Todd, but unfortunately Apple is complaining about your advertising, not your device's support of different bit rates. The problem is that Sony is falsely claiming that its new player, which has exactly the same storage capacity as Apple's mid-range iPod, holds 13,000 songs while the iPod only holds 5,000, which is, of course, patently false, intentionally misleading, and possibly outright criminal. Because guess what? iTunes will encode at 48 Kbps, too, if you tell it to-- and while Sony admits that 48 Kbps is its minimum, iTunes will go all the way down to 16 Kbps. Maybe Apple should simply start advertising its 20 GB iPod as holding "39,000 songs-- 3x the capacity of the Network Walkman!!" and see what Todd thinks about that.

Meanwhile, Angry Todd might also do well to refrain from tossing around sound bites about how the Walkman is "all about choice" when its customers can't encode or play songs at bit rates lower than 48 Kbps, higher than 256 Kbps (iTunes does 320 Kbps), or in any format other than Sony's own proprietary ATRAC3, which, as we recently mentioned, finished way behind pretty much everything else out there in a public listening test comparing the sound quality of different digital music formats. The iTunes-iPod tag team, meanwhile, supports AAC, MP3, WAV, uncompressed AIFF, and the new Apple Lossless format. Man, whoever thought Apple would wind up being the company that's "all about choice"?