To prevent even more posts on the Rio Car announcement thread, I'm creating this one for discussion of the "Mark 3" (not officially named this) that will not show up from Rio directly, but will probably appear in the future.

Good idea, I'm moving my reply to this thread, then.

Hugo posted:
The unit had USB host (but no ethernet/USB slave/serial), CD slot for ripping, face-off, 4x45W amp, AM/FM tuner, bigger VFD (but smaller pixels), and was not pull-out - but the HDD was removeable and docked with USB. CPU was a 200MHz ARM9. The audio stage was basically identical, just using a slightly newer philips DSP.

Wow, I thought Rob said you won't be posting specs, hope you don't get in trouble for doing that.

It seems that if all you do with your empeg is listen to music then you'd have been even happier with the mk3. On the other hand, I can't imagine sitting in the car for hours with a laptop while hacking on it. Even rigging wireless ethernet wouldn't really help - you wouldn't be able to see the display if you weren't in the car.

Ignoring hackability, it does sound really impressive. I hope some OEMs take you up on the design!

Borislav