Er - no qwerty because they're Japanese phones...in Japanese...for Japanese speakers...in Japan...

I have one of these. I've had it for about eight months so I'm not sure why this would be a news item. It is quite simply astonishing audio quality for its size. I have a Meridian cinema set up too, so I knew what the sticker shock was going to be, but even so I was only "portable boombox - meh" until I heard it at the dealer. I was sold after two minutes. Now I use it constantly around the house and in the office.

My dealer says that (a) he sells all the units he can get, and (b) he sells them by taking a charge slip dated for 7 days later and letting people take the unit home to try out, to return it no questions asked if they don't like it. So far, no returns...

Hello Palm ? Hello ? Anyone home ? Pick up, pick up. Just calling to see if you intend to release any kind of new designs this year, you know, like all of your competitors seem to be able to manage to do quite regularly. Just asking, is all.

You're missing my point. I know they're expensive now. But they will get much cheaper very quickly - look at the price/Gb curve over time for any of the flash card technologies, then extrapolate that curve into SSDs and you will see it overtaking HDD very quickly.

I guarantee you will not be able to buy a laptop with HDD in three years time, and it will be price comparable for desktop drives for all except the very largest capacities.

The HDD drive manufacturers are toast unless they get into SSD, and real quick.

How can the stock prices for Seagate, Western Digital, etc etc not be getting crushed right now ? All these guys are out of business in three years, surely ? SSDs are as big and as fundamental a change as the move from floppy disk to internal hard disk.

This looks like the latest version of the 7000 series lifebooks. I have one of these and they are the dog's undercarriage: nothing to beat them as a small laptop to travel with.

Isn't there a perfectly good new improved JPG format called, er, JPG ? (OK, JPG2000, to be precise). Why would anyone want to switch to yet another proprietary format ? Why don't any of these corporations look at the non-success of proprietary formats in any area where an open standard exists (yes Sony, I'm looking at you), and just give it up.

And this has proper SPDIF digital audio out ? Isn't this the only dock that has that capability for any ipod (I know there's the $2000 dock, but that needs your ipod to have surgery) ? Sign me up.

And come the (E-)revolution, they'll presumably be joining the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation up against the wall ?

And this is, in a microcosm, exactly why Toyota will be the world's #1 car company very soon.

Toyota (and Honda) concentrate on making better designed cars with higher quality production processes and maximum reliability. GM concentrates on pointless, useless, gadgets for their poorly designed and poorly built offerings.