The RCA Lyra announced support for the microdrive, then withdrew it. 1Gb is ok, and I'm sure 2Gb will be out within a year, but by then 2.5" drives will probably be 64Gb per drive :)

I guess the Rio has local RAM cache in the 340Mb backpack, powering down the drive totally after caching; I've been assured by people who should know that they get 10 hours with the microdrive and 2xAA (normal rio is 1xAA and 11 hours). Cameras are a different kettle of fish, requiring burst transfer when you take a pic, and bugger all the rest of the time, as opposed to the constant trickle of data that playing compressed audio requires - really, IBM should have put 4Mb or 8Mb of buffer into the microdrive and solved it from their end.

Rio have also announced a dataplay backpack (see www.dataplay.com - 500Mb 1" worm disks) - the dataplay drive includes 4Mb of buffer and runs from 3.3v.

Hugo