www.apple.com/ipod/start

 Apple on Wednesday introduced a new iPod music player which the company said can speak song titles, artists and playlist names to users.

The new music player can speak 14 languages including English, Chinese, French and German. It is priced at 79 dollars in the U.S. market.

The 4-gigabyte iPod shuffle is Apple’s first music player that has the talking feature and also “the world’s smallest music player at nearly half of the size of the previous model,” the company said.

The new model is significantly smaller than a AA battery, holds up to 1,000 songs and is easier to use with all of the controls conveniently located on the earphone cord.

“The amazingly small new iPod shuffle takes a revolutionary approach to how you listen to your music by talking to you, also making it the first iPod shuffle with playlists,” Greg Joswiak, Apple’s vice president of iPod product marketing, said in a statement.

Apple Inc said on Tuesday it had launched an online shop selling second-hand Apple products in China, offering discounts of up to 22 percent, as it looks to beef up its business in the country.

U.S. retailer Best Buy Co earlier this month started selling refurbished versions of Apple iPhone 3G that were priced about $50 less than new ones in an effort to seek new ways to appeal to cost-conscious shoppers.

These are products that were previously sold and returned to Apple and have undergone quality tests, the company’s website said.

The refurbished products available on Apple’s Chinese website ranged from a 308 yuan ($44) iPod shuffle to an iMac computer costing more than 14,000 yuan ($2,047).

“We kicked off the campaign at the end of last year,” said Huang Yuna, Apple’s spokeswoman in China. She declined to give a figure of total used products available.

Apple has introduced similar deals in other countries, including the Unites States, the United Kingdom and Japan, for years, but second-hand purchase only makes up a small portion of its total sales.

Stocks tumbled on Tuesday as investors confronted fresh signs that the recession is worsening and worried that efforts to stabilize the beleaguered financial system may not prove sufficient.

Among big manufacturers, shares of 3M Co (MMM.N) fell almost 4 percent to $47.55, while Caterpillar Inc (CAT.N) shed 5.1 percent to $29.36. On Nasdaq, shares of iPod and iPhone maker Apple Inc (AAPL.O) were a top drag, down 3.5 percent at $95.78. The semiconductor index (.SOXX) fell 5 percent.

Wal-Mart (WMT.N) was the only stock higher in the 30-component Dow industrial average after the retailer posted a quarterly profit that beat Wall Street’s forecasts. It was up 3.3 percent at $48.07.

U.S. President Barack Obama is due to sign a $787 billion economic stimulus bill into law on Tuesday, but investors are fearful that the measure would not help soften the impact of the 14-month-old recession soon enough. The White House hopes the package will save or create 3.5 million jobs.

The slide took the benchmark S&P 500 below the 800 level for the first time since the bear market low of November 21, weighed by financials, energy companies and big manufacturers.

Shares of Bank of America (BAC.N) fell 10.2 percent to $5 on the New York Stock Exchange, as shares of JPMorgan (JPM.N) lost nearly 9 percent to $22.53. Wells Fargo (WFC.N) dropped more than 7 percent to $14.54, as the KBW Banks index (.BKX) tumbled 7.2 percent.

“There’s still trouble in the banking sector, trouble with respect to corporate earnings and nothing that we’ve seen is going to reverse that in the short term,” said Dan Greenhous, market analyst at Miller Tabak & Co in New York.

“I don’t believe equities are appropriately priced for weakness through the entirety of 2009.”

The Dow Jones industrial average (.DJI) slid 263.95 points, or 3.36 percent, to 7,586.46. The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index (.SPX) dropped 32.62 points, or 3.95 percent, to 794.22. The Nasdaq Composite Index (.IXIC) tumbled 53.90 points, or 3.51 percent, to 1,480.46.

Before the market’s open, a report showing that manufacturing production in New York state fell to a record low in February added to worries about the deepening recession among investors already fearful that a new U.S. economic stimulus package won’t be a quick fix.

In Japan data showed on Monday that the world’s second biggest economy sank deeper into recession with its worst quarterly contraction since the oil crisis in the 1970s.

Energy shares slid along with plunging oil prices, sending Exxon Mobil (XOM.N) down 4.3 percent to $71.41. U.S. front-month crude dropped 6.7 percent, or $2.54, to $34.98 a barrel amid concern the deepening recession will sap energy demand.