The boot into text mode whilst in-car "feature" was supposed to have been in the very first release - somehow it got overlooked until now.

Here's the rationale as I understand it.

Animated visuals could be considered distracting. Sooner or later someone may crash their car while looking at empeg visuals instead of the road - common sense would say that this is their own dumb fault, but certain litigious countries don't see it like that (I'm not saying that's right, and I'm not saying that's wrong). By setting the default in-car screen mode to a textual information page, empeg require that their clients make a definite conscious decision to switch to a moving visual, and in doing so bring much of the responsibility for the consequences upon themselves. Of course this is backed up with warnings and disclaimers in the documentation.

Take a look at some other high end car stereos that plot visuals - they boot into a warning screen, which you have to acknowledge before getting any moving graphics.

Switching to a visualisation is a lot less user intensive than, for example, changing a playlist or searching for a track.

Of course I'm not talking officially for empeg, this is my personal perspective on the issue.

Rob