WOW bummer, yes I'm saddened & mad well a whole range of emotions coming home to read this. I'm kinda wondering why it wasn't in 'announcements' cat. but oh well to be put in 'general' cat. is an understatement. I for one don't feel cheated, as one poster commented we are all guinea pigs in a sense, my car still has bugs & TSB's and it's a potential hazard if something is wrong w/it. The empeg may have never seen the light of day had they never come forward w/ the unit publicly or had people give ideas, as I see it was pretty much done when it was created. I've been to the Slashdot site, admittedly while I've never heard of the site before now, voiced some of my opinions or should say gave my reasons for backing such a product & why it was worth it for me. I bought the base line product 12Gig (figuring I'd update the HDD when prices fell), I find it was still worth it to me even w/the acused high price. There was nothing like this out when I bought mine & won't be for quite awhile, though the package will be different I feel like Pioneers HDD CD player will be close. Barring any horendous accidents my empeg will be playing for quite some time, I would like to see the voice recognition to come out, I doo feel that this should be finished. While not necessarily promised or included I have read about it so much I want it & I feel it would've really push the capabilites very far.
I feel as another poster mentioned that Rio's portables aren't not what people really want it's just what the general public is being fed at the moment as what they should have. Unfortunately too few people realized the potential of this product to keep it going although I don't personally think SB gave it much of a chance at all, it's been what, 8-9 months? I know the customers are out there as human nature they were waiting for a sort of finalization of the product, afterall it didn't have even atuner yet, what did SB expect! When SB bought empeg, I imagined they would redesign the empeg making it less costly, using more mass produced manufacturing methods & buying power. Rather, it looks like, they thought it would be a quick bump in their sells pinned on a hopeful MP3 car in-dash craze that has been slow to develop. SB didn't really put much into the development that I saw, though I couldn't see much of what really went on. Personally I don't think it's a geek product just because it uses a computer & Linux it's the beginning of what the future will be like anyway as far as I'm concerned. I really believe that the right company could've sent the empeg through the roof. Get the manufacturing price down via mass production methods but keeping the same look & feel leaving just the software side to devlop new things & plugins to sell for more versatility.

Well here's to the future whatever it may bring, thanks guys for a piece of history that changed how I listened & accessed my music. I commend the developers for reaching the staus they have so far, their hard work is very apparent in their product & support of it, very rare. I don't see this as an end though & hope to see the evolution of it all.

#695-Mk2/8 colors-12Gig w/Tuner- awaits v2.x & Voice Recog.