I saw the competing HP box at the local Best Buy store recently. Like many of the items for sale in Best Buy it was not even hooked up so you could use it and nobody was looking at it (besides me).

Judging from the look and feel of it, the HP is a very cheaply made component. It had the "Hi there! I'm a crappy quality platic made in China piece of junk" written all over it. Even the buttons felt like they were about to fall off just from pressing them. This is not what I would expect from a $1000 piece of equipment! I thought to myself, "what's wrong with HP, aren't they embarassed to have their good name written on this trash?"

I would hope this new SonicBlue version of the same concept has the same high quality standards as our Empegs.

What SonicBlue really needs to do next is marry the audio and video products into a single unit. The same unit that records TV on a hard drive should also store your music. Considering they already have Replay TV and now this, maybe that's not too far away. Rob????