One thing just came to my mind. I'm owning an EMPEG some weeks now and i am very happy with it so far. I also own a Toshiba Libretto 50CT subnote, and so the following came to my mind.

The 50CT for those who don't know, is a full PC with a P-120 Processor, with all the fancy thing we are all waiting for, PCMCIA, network, etc. It comes with a nice 640*480 32K color VGA display, etc etc. It goes, used or refurbished, for about $500.

SInce i overclocked mine, i had to strip away all the parts around, the case, the keyboard, display, battery, etc. What you have left is a very very small mobo which fit's into a DIN-slot with no problems. I guess even 4 of those mainboards will fit in a DIN slot. So fill up the DIN slot with a single mobo, you could place lots of periphicals around it, some disks, a hardware MP3 decoder, etc etc. Also, you have PCMCIA, USB, serial, parallell, IrDA, you name it.

What i was thinking about it to build up my own 'Auto-PC' - take the inside of the libretto, make it fit into a DIN slot case. Add a hardware MP3 decoder to it. Then, take the keyboard and the display, extend their connectors (flat printed ribbon cables) and mount that somewhere in the car. In the end, it will be a full, little PC where you can run whatever you want - Linux, NT, WIndows, whatever.

What do you think about that ? Now, another, stupid, dumb, silly, slap my face idea was, if i would be the EMPEG folks, i probably would have gone to toshiba and license their libretto board design and built the empeg on top of it. I mean, whenever we ask for hardware things to be put in new empeg releases, the common answer is it cannot be done because of room or missing features of this and that. If you look at the libretto mobo on the other hand, you will see what IS possible to be placed into a volume probably 1/3rd of the EMPEG size.

Now, i know the answer is reliability. The only thing i can say is, i'm carrying the libretto around for over a year now in my bag. throwing it here and there, and it still works :-) I got rain, ice-tea, coffee, pouring into the unit, and - to my suprise - it still works...i think it's great and i would love to see that unit in my car...

Any opinions ? Thanks, Jo