Thanks for posting this story, even if it jumped the gun a little bit. It prompted me to revisit the iRiver support site and I found that 1.60 firmware had been released, dated Sept. 1st. Look here
http://www.iriver.com/support/download_view.asp?id x=611&page=1&p_name=H140&word=&category=Firmware%2 0&%20Drivers
Don't get too excited, though. The only new feature that was a regular in user wishlists and which I am going to use regularly is file deletion from the player. "Gapless" is certainly not what I expected (live albums, eg, still hava an awkward pause between songs).
Nothing's been done about improving navigation (with 5100 files in my H140, this is a big issue), which is still the major flaw in my opinion. I'd love to see an open version of the firmware, but for now on this will have to do. When I was researching digital players, I went for the iRiver H140 and despite some shortcomings, I'm not sorry. With 40Gb, standard usb mass storage device interface, recording capabilities, radio tuner, and especially ogg support (a must for me), I think it's the best hardware out there (although I haven't kept up with new players since I bought this).
Someone else in the forum mentioned an open source program to create databases, but that branch seems to be pretty much abandoned. But, oh, the joys of free software! Someone else picked up the project and has released a new version that fixes some of the bugs. Find it at
http://www.fataltourist.com/iripdb/
This new version is already in debian testing, by the way.
