I can't see any major manufacturer besting the empeg within 3 years. The market is too tough - those guys want to sell tens, if not hundreds of thousands of units, and to do that they have to meet certain criteria:

1) Price. Sony's latest effort is still as much as the empeg was originally, making ebay prices look darn cheap. The fact of the matter is that this type of device is not cheap to manufacture - custom motherboard, custom software, laptop hard-drives, pricey displays, etc, and all for a fairly limited market.

2) Ease of use. I suspect that this may be partly the reason that Sony have made their unit with an integral CD reader - the average Joe is going to find it more convenient to put the CD in their car once in order to rip, then to muck around ripping and syncing via PC. Yes, this does bring some severe limitations that the empeg doesn't have, but does make the unit more accessible to technophobes.

3) Legal acceptability. The empeg uses an open-spec standard file format for music storage. That's great for us, but major OEM manufacturers may have concerns about going down that same route. The Sony unit uses a proprietary closed-spec secure file format - a design decision surely influenced by their music publishing arm. Part of me suspects that other companies will try to do the same.

So how will these issues be addressed?

1) Well, if the car manufacturers get involved, the pricing may get hidden in the cost of the car. Especially if they are already putting in most of the necessary hardware components (motherboard, CPU, display etc) for other purposes such as GPS, car-related functionality and DVD. Slap a laptop drive in, license some technology from SB, and the cost delta per car will be far lower.

2) Ease of use for the masses will be attained be dropping features. I wouldn't be surprised to see the car manufacturers go Sony's route of rip-in-car either - since they are already putting DVD drives in them. Reduced flexibility and choice, but they'll aim to make it so easy to use that a blind and deaf octagenarian could use it in their sleep.

3) IANAL, but this past year hasn't been the greatest for MP3 technology from a legal standpoint. The RIAA is getting more and more aggressive towards it, and I think that we're still some time off from the end-game, when all the court battles have been fought, and everyone knows where they stand. But companies might also be wary of going with their own format - it'll bring short-term costs (development), and longer-term costs (they'll have to support it - the empeg guys never had to worry much about the ripping and encoding process). And then when you look at the rate at which storage and networking capabilities increase, why bother? .wav files are a viable solution *now*. Just how worthwhile will that propietary format be in 3 years time?