Speaking as a guy who has had one since the first week they were available:
* When device is ‘locked’ and you click the left button to display buttons for vol +/- and location +/-, display current playback location without having to fully unlock screen.
* Support adhoc wifi networks
* Support syncing of podcasts when connected to wifi
* Better syncing of which podcast eps have been listened to and where you’ve left off between device and PCs
* Ability to search marketplace when connected to wifi

2.5" HD's? $400? If you are in the market for such a thing, why not save a few bucks (and more time down the road) new Acer Aspire Home Servers that can be had on Amazon for $50 bucks less and use properly sized hard drives (and still have eSATA & USB for more) and have a real OS (Windows Home Server) to boot?.

I'm afraid not jon, when you add a drive to the Windows Home Server storage pool it is formatted and you lose anything on it... in order to keep the data on it you would need to manually copy everything off and then add it to the pool.

Windows Home Server's Drive Extender > RAID: http://www.fearthecowboy.com/2008/08/windows-home-server-drive-extender-vs.html

IIRC they will use your existing 3d accelerator to draw the bits for the added display... I've seen one of these in person with 2 USB driven LCD's driving a HD WMV video with Aero Glass running... needless to say I was quite impressed.

@E71

Lemme know when there exists a Linux based product on the market that is just as easy to use and just as powerful (single instance backup, optional per share duplication, easy restore process) as Windows Home Server and I'd be happy to look.

And no... saying "take x, y, z and install them on foo" or even "Well the ____ distro can do some of that" isn't much of an option when competing against a product you can go to your local electronics store and fine, bring home, unbox (no server software installation required), plug into your network, install a bit of software on each of your client PCs and just have work.

Why should a company like Niveus spend their time making a customized UI and whatever other back end services might be required when Windows Home Server exists today and works pretty damn well?

I actually kinda hope this isn't real... at least in the short term as next week I'm going to be having my boss order me a nice 1530 and I'd oh so hate to have these come out the week after mine arrives!

If I won... I'd sell it all to help pay off my student loan debt: http://www.brendansstudentloans.com

Agreed. Blast them not taking my US address even though I'm 70 miles from the border.