It needs...

A Clock display in there somewhere, settable by the user.

If one of the display modes could show a suitably "active" version of the Empeg boot screen, that would be Excellent! Dancing penguin, anyone?

The boot screen needs to stay up there for about a couple of seconds longer (just for the effect, dontcha know)

The handle could do with unfolding/hinging up further than it does when taking the unit out of the slide

...and a petrol gauge showing how much available disk space remains.

.. and a spinner while downloads are taking place...

Re. the clock idea. As far as I'm aware the unit has no means of keeping time while it's powered off. Setting it manually each time is obviously not practical, but it could maybe get the time from RDS (Radio Data System, digital data on a subcarrier of FM broadcast radio) at least in countries that have RDS such as the UK which should allow it to get the correct (or at least the current FM station's idea of correct) time within not many seconds of booting up.

My Philips Carin 440 head unit has 3 clock options; user settable, from RDS, from GPS.

Cheers,

Mark.

Ah, right; I wasn't aware it hadn't got an RTC. What on earth made me forget that?

Re. the RDS time idea - yes, that would be about the best alternative.

I mentioned this to the empeg folks a while back, and IIRC, the response was that it didn't have an RTC, like you mentioned, but that it would support displaying the time taken from RDS.