I'm sure I replied to a firewire post....
It would be hard & expensive to add firewire. There's no PCI bus on the empeg, just the equivalent of an ISA - basically, all the peripherals are *on chip* on the SA1100, so an external fast bus like PCI isn't needed. To get firewire (which invariably sits on PCI) would require a change of CPU to, say, the SA110 and 21285 bridge chip. Then, we'd have to add a LCD controller, UARTs, sound, etc - basically, it's not worth it. Speed of USB is ample: we don't intend people to empty and refill their hard disks all the time. The normal usage of the empeg is putting your collection on there once then adding and removing tunes/albums/etc as and when: this is only *one* big download. Firewire is totally OTT for this - USB is more pervasive, cheaper, and simpler.
USB on the front is in theory possible (but we'd have to remove it from the back) but it'd look ugly and would encourage scratching of the case. If you're clever you could make the USB dock anyway and have a captive cable for downloading in the car.
I don't know if firewire works like USB in the master/slave sense, but if it does you can't hook slaves together (ie: the empeg is a USB slave. It has to be, otherwise you couldn't connect it to a PC (USB master). This means you can't plug other slave devices (hdds, cameras, scanners, ethernet) into it and expect them to talk).
Hugo