The speed of a connection over Firewire, alas, depends on a lot of things! Try comparing the speed of Xplay with MMJB for example. There are bottlenecks possible anywhere, and some of them make comparison of the raw hardware speed irrelevant - and this has always been true.

Of course, for readers who simply can't bear to see anything compared in any way favourably with an Apple branded product, the issue isn't whether there's a bottleneck. It's a question of "any stick will do" to discredit the report.

The report was simple enough: the device is cheaper than an iPod and for PC users, will be seen as an alternative.

It's not available for Mac, so saying how much better the Mac product is, seems bizarre.

There are no review samples available. It's not a review, so complaining about the lack of review features seems peculiar, to put it gently.

And the fact that USB 2.0 can only rarely match Firewire throughput doesn't alter the fact: at a quoted speed of above the Firewire speed, many people will think it's worth buying. You're quite right, all of you who reported that in some situations, Firewire will go faster... but that won't stop people seeing the spec and buying. That's what people do.

As for those who regard this as a "useless sight" well - we're glad to have readers, whatever their level of literacy!

:-)