The availability of new Rios through retailers is soon to be no more. Those few left will fetch a premium leaving eBay as the sole source for obtaining a (used) unit at a reasonable price.

Is there any realistic chance that SonicBlue will put the Rios back into production, or better yet, revisit the design and release a "Rio II" with a better display, built-in 802.11b wireless, and perhaps other spiffy features as well?

I haven't seen any indications that this might happen. The Rio for all practical purposes appears to be a dead product.

Which is a shame, because for all its shortcomings it's fundamentally a good design that can be built upon to do wonderful things that competing products (Audiotron, e.g.) can't do, such as natively supporting heterogeneous collections of music, lossless codecs, web-based control and direct streaming.

For there to be any chance of a new Rio, it seems to me that SonicBlue must be made aware of the enthusiasm that exists.

The question is, how to go about doing this?

--Reed http://jreceiver.sourceforge.net