Hey Rob...thanks for the info!

I hadn't thought about battery life issues. Though Sharp and some others are putting Linux in PDA's with good battery life, so it must be possibe. It just seems strange having you guys go to all this work making great HD-based MP3 software only to have the Portables Group in Oregon go off and design their own software that does the same thing. Why not tweak the empeg software to get good battery life instead? From then on SonicBlue would have one main codebase to maintain rather than two. Just because there's two different groups that shouldn't be an issue-- that's for management to take care of. Isn't that the whole point of SonicBlue-- i.e. bringing all these companies together? It seems like that's not happening at all. Based on what I know, I personally wouldn't invest in SonicBlue.

Can you tell us how big the unit is? Is it similar in size to the iPod or is it big like Nomad Jukebox?

Also, who will manufacture the unit? Will it be manufatured by the same company that did the Rio 800? I ask this because I did a lot of research on the net trying to decide if I'd like the Rio 800. I decided based on many, many hours of reading that the Rio 800 was made with poor quality control. Just go on cnet or amazon and take a look at the comments. In some cases over half the people that bought this product give it a thumbs down! I challenge you to find another consumer electronics product with such a bad user rating! This rating appears to have nothing to do with the unit's excellent design and everything to do with poor quality control in manufacture. It would be nice to hear SonicBlue acknowledge the problem they've had and that it's been fixed.

Empeg/RioCar by constrast are quality units. You hear almost no one on the message boards complaining about the quality of these units. It's a pretty stark contrast.

I really hope SonicBlue fixes these quality problems otherwise I don't think I'd be buying one no matter how good the design is. Judging from Apple's past track record, I have little doubt that the iPod is a quality unit.