here's the link
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/5457434/site/newsweek/
sadly it's not a new karma
cheers
--edited: corrected url formatting

Ever so slightly slimmer (again)
12 hour battery life, up from 8 - much needed improvement, could be better though
new scroll wheel copied off the iPod mini - not a huge deal
UI changes - Minor tweaking that could have been done to existing models
20 and 40gb - Still has the Karma beat for size, and the high end iPod price spot sits empty, awaiting the 60gb versions.

For me, 40gb would probably be about what I could squeeze my music onto. The Karma's 18.6 gb usable space was difficult, and so my Europe trip music has been lacking a few albums I wished were on there.

Had I not won the Karma in Amersfoort, I would probably have bought the smaller of the coming new Rio HD players (looked sweeeeet). If I wanted everything with me, I'd have to bring the empeg anyway (or computer)...

> the smaller of the coming new Rio HD players
oh don't do that to me! "players" ah when, when, when?
ok, It'd be nice if they could get the karma to europe for a competitive price (250€) anyhow

One of my friends just bought one (he calls the Karma ugly and refuses to listen to me when I tell him how much better it is). I have spent some time playing around with it and I have to say the new wheel/button combo works very well.

They do it for their computers so why not the mp3 players too.

Examples? MacOSX updates work on all older hardware, unless you're talking a chipset that it's just plain too much work to code for. There comes a point where backward compatibility isn't worth it, but the iPods hardly seem to fall in that category,

Rev1/2 had their operating software stored in flash. Rev3+ stored it in SDRAM, which removed the 2MB size limitation that (at least the original) Rev1 had.

Rev4 uses the 5020 CPU, which (though it has the same twin ARM7 architecture) is significantly different and so harder to backport code from to the 5002 that was in rev1-3.

Hugo

I remember when OSX came out people were having to use hacks to get it to work with macs that had processer upgrades. There was a hack that would trick the osx install program into thinking you had a newer mac then it would install and run fine.

I agree that backward compatibility isn't always worth it but that case just seemed like they were trying to force people to but new computers.