andy: I am saying however that whatever Rio do some Karmas will fail early on in their lives. All electronic goods have this problem, the Karma has more of a problem because it has a hard disk (as does the iPod and others).

Right, and again: Given this allegedly unavoidable phenomenon, Rio/DNNA should be prepared to deal with the situation promptly.

andy: If I was designing a product support strategy I would make sure that such a customer was flagged immediately and given extremely good support, immediately. I would make sure that they were overnighted a replacement unit and when I had their broken unit back (and had confirmed a second failure) I would refund half their purchase price.

That's nice, but from what I'm told, Rio/DNNA's repair/replacement response time is poor. I have yet to hear from Rio support, myself.