Has anyone ever gotten good sound out of the induction earphones? I demo'd some with my own iPod recently and at full volume, it was very very quiet. Too quiet. Interesting experience, but the volume just couldn't cut it. Anyone else have that experience?

W00t! Gadgets!

I paid around USD$300 for mine in May in Roppongi. It's the 450, white.

It has 100 ethernet, and you can set it to login to a windows machine. What this actually means is... I'm not sure, the manual is entirely in Japanese. :D But it may do the loverly thing you suggest.

Manual of unit in Japanese, still possible to gleen data from it though: http://panasonic.jp/support/audio/manual/main_1.html

I haven't encountered a CD that it couldn't rip, but could try specific albums that are known to be difficult to test. I have the Japanese model, so not sure if it differs, in that respect, to the coming US one.

I have one of these in the Japanese versions, and language difficulties aside, they're nice units. It'll rip a CD in about 2 minutes, nice menu organization (even without understanding the Japanese, it's a lot of simple icons) for finding albums, songs, artists, different favorites compilations. It contains a Gracenote database built in that can be updated via an ethernet port on the back. Speakers are excellent for what is the size of a heavy bookcase unit.

Now that they're coming out in English, I'll be able to get an English manual!

Sure is. :) Note: Word is that a more powerful version of this for the same price will be released with a month (Q3 2007).

Yes, add in frozen client, which is a new one, for me. Five times in the past 45 minutes. I'm going to go play First Life for a bit.

For the record, I installed the .Net 2.0 framework on my WinXP box and was able to follow the bare basic instructions to get into the OpenSim. I was actually pretty surprised it was that easy. Of course, limited functionality et al, but being a *nix person, I expected a whole lot more tweaking just to get some results. Jolly good progress!