I had NO IDEA they were going to announce those projects without NDA!

There are some factual errors in the article, but in those cases the actual spec is better than stated. Don't worry, Pearl does NOT run the Riot software, although it has an evolved version of the Riot UI (which is actually very nice). The software is based on the post-2.0 empeg codebase, with some very sweet new features (such as the cross fader which was mentioned in the article, and Ogg Vorbis support which was not).

The photos don't really demonstrate scale. To put it in context, the Pearl player (the one with the bright organge rotary control in the corner) is about two thirds the length of an iPod, and a little wider. It's very small!

The tiny 1.5GB player is based on the S-Series software with better database for music selection. It's about the same physical size as an S50 and uses some brand new miniature hard drive technology.

So now it's out - these are the two projects that are occupying most of our time at the moment. In my rather biased opinion they are both going to be absolutely killer products - but Pearl is the one that car player owners are going to want

Unfortunately you're going to have to wait a few months!

Rob