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Are we expecting anything new and exciting from the DNNA/Rio crew for example?

As usual, Rio don't have a booth at CES; our marketing folk seem to prefer working behind the scenes with important resellers. However, this year plenty of Rio Cambridge are going to be wandering round the show as delegates (not me though), so it might be worth keeping an eye on other people's name-badges.

If I were going to CES this year I'd be looking at Linux-based media players. Specifically I'd be asking which were just using Linux as an irreplaceable (signed) firmware, and which were actual open systems in the manner of a Linksys or an Empeg.



To be fair, though iRiver have a "booth", this was at the back of the south hall and was essentially a closed suite - unless you had an appointment, you couldn't get past the receptionist.

Big showy booths are good for smaller retailers - eg, specialist hifi - and as such Denon & Marantz had these. For companies which sell mostly to big companies (Best Buy, Circuit City), suites or meeting rooms are more useful and efficient - hence Rio and iRiver being non-public displays. I'd like more of a show floor prescence too, but I can see why we (and others) don't have it.

In fact, the people with booths tend to fall into these categories:

- huge company wanting to brag (Samsung, Panasonic, Sony, LG, etc)
- company with many small resellers (high-end audio)
- company in need of representation (eg, Chinese companies looking for resellers)

As for PMPs, any media player that claims to do WMA9 (and most of the linux ones are running code from Implicit) will be closed to one extent or another. I did catch the FIC one on AMDs booth (Alchemy 1200 CPU) but that was Implicit too. Everyone seems to be supporting WMA video, there were some very impressive HDTV resolution non-portable media players on show.

Hugo