Firewire is the de-facto standard for video. It's now twice the speed it was before (1394b) as well. I see Firewire being used everywhere and mentioned all the time. I don't see USB 2 mentioned anywhere or used by anyone for anything. How much power can be provided over the USB 2.0 connection by the way? I like having both USB and Firewire anyway. If USB 2 takes as much time to hit the scene in a big way as did 1.0, then we may see a third and fourth Firewire variant hit the scene first.

And to whomever said they'd prefer ETHERNET (of all things!) to Firewire on a portable device... Insanity. Sounds like a person that's never used Firewire. Or only needs to transfer 2KB text files. Or both. Ethernet on the empeg is great because of its non-file-transfer related uses. For mass transfer of music it would have been very nice to have Firewire (of course hard drives were also a lot smaller back in the day...)

The iPod is very reasonably priced when compared to other top-quality players. Comparing it to something like a Neo or Archos or Nomad is a little unfair. Look at the build quality and interface for starters. Next compare it to solid state players of the same size. That's the immediate competition. The iPod hold a lot more than any solid state player and it's cheaper than some of them too (5GB model anyway). If you want something small, there's no other game in town.

If you want (or don't mind) something larger, then the Riot looks like the best engineered piece of kit. I don't mind something even larger than the Riot, so the empeg is my perfect choice. It's also nice because it fits right into my car. Like this I can stay warm while driving around, instead of walking in the cold, 60km to work.

Bruno