SanDisk reinvents 1980s personal stereo for the noughties
Sansa SlotPlayer to take SlotMusic cards only
SanDisk has continued with plans to replace the CD with the SD, by launching a portable music player based around its pre-loaded Micro SD card notion.
The Sansa SlotMusic Player is designed to take the storage firm’s SlotMusic cards, unveiled last month. Fortunately, it also accepts so-called “self-loaded” Micro SD cards crammed full of your own musical mixtures.
Think of it as the cassette Walkman de nos jours.
SanDisk's Sansa SlotMusic Player: Micro SD cards only
To get things moving, SanDisk’s teamed up with a stream of artists, including Coldplay and girl-kisser Katy Perry, to launch a series of SD cards with the artists’ albums pre-loaded. The Sansa slotMusic Player comes pre-loaded with an album on a 1GB SlotMusic card, but some of the capacity’s consumed by liner notes, album art and content “personally chosen” by the artist.
The storage manufacturer’s even created a range of Sansa SlotMusic Player accessories, which include a card wallet, an armband and “shells” for customising players to your individual taste.
SanDisk will initially release the player into the US for $35 (£20/€26) - each pre-loaded SD card costs $15 (£8.60/€11.06). The player and pre-loaded cards will be shipped into Europe next year, but a UK price hasn’t been recorded yet.
COMMENTS
This Can Only Be A Good Thing
Millions of unemployed Japanese rice-grain painters can now find work doing SD cover art. At this time of global financial crisis, the world *desperately* needs these new industries.
You vile naysayers ought to be ashamed.
@ Epic Fail
"@ Ed Deckard: I don't know where the £16 came from , the article says £8.60. You reeled a few in though!"
It came straight from the article, which may have been altered since then.
@ Kev K
Already out, my brother owns one, makes the drive clunky and long though, to accommodate the battery and headphone electronics etc.
This thing wouldn't be so bad if it had a screen and inbuilt high capacity flash storage drive, which would give the option to download the album card to internal storage when plugged into to the player or just to play the music.
Size
Not that I would mind an SD card, but the micro is too small for practical use. If the music were completely un-compressed and the card would last as long as a cd, then I would have no problem switching. My problem stems from dealing with my mom and other 'older' relatives trying to keep up with all this small stuff. They can barely read the small print now.
Seriously, I have to buy hardware based on how simple a remote is (Very few good all-in-one remotes with nice big buttons and easy to explain setup) for them. It's not stupidity on their part, just old age and bad eyes. For some reason, my mom thinks pressing "TV" should turn on the tv, not "Component" (I'm already being punished with the change-over from analog to digital signals). CD's are about as small as my mom is getting and my grandfather only uses the cd's that I get him (still loves his albums with all the snap, crackle and pop).
I really hope this small format fails and a more reasonably sized one pops up. Eventually, my eyes are going to go bad and I don't think my younger relatives (being raised in their short attention span culture) are going to want to spend the time to explain what's on each little card that I own and help me find some small slot on a console.
So explain to me why this is better than my phone and Bluetooth headphones?
Kind of a weird product, as if some senior manager in marketing's got a bee in his (her) bonnet about something.
I definitely won't be buying one. I've got an older Sandisk music player that uses a USB stick (fine except it only uses their stick) and its been mostly superceeded by my cellphone -- plays music and makes phone calls.
