Although SanDisk's venture into the world of portable music players is not exactly backed up by a very long experience in this field, the company managed to come up with some pretty impressive models over time, each of them providing advanced and innovative features at some pretty affordable price tags. And that's exactly the case with the company's latest announcement, namely the Sansa Clip model, a device whose features make it a very serious competitor for the iPod Shuffle or for another miniature portable jukebox, the Zen Stone from Creative.

"Don't let the Sansa Clip's size fool you," said Keith Washo, SanDisk retail product marketing manager for the Sansa Clip. "This tiny player packs a powerful, feature-rich punch. We're excited to bring music lovers a new, cool-looking player with great sound and audio offerings in a body that's smaller than a match box."

And SanDisk's representative is quite right, as this device really offers a little something for every fashion-conscious user. Thus, beside the fact that it's available in several color versions and 2 storage capacities (1 and 2 GB), the device also sports a wearable clip for hands-free portability (hence its name), as well as a large, bright (OLED) screen with a simple user interface that makes it easy to choose the playlists or songs sorted by title, artist, album, genre.

Since we're talking about songs, it's worth mentioning the fact that the Sansa Clip supports many music download and subscription services, including Rhapsody To Go, Napster, eMusic and others. It's designed to work seamlessly with a wide range of popular music formats such as MP3, WAV, Audible (for audio books) and Windows Media Audio (WMA) in both unprotected and protected files (such as those WMA files purchased from music stores). The Sansa Clip can also play "DRM-free" MP3 downloads.

The Sansa Clip also sports an FM tuner and recorder with 40 preset stations, as well as a built-in microphone, which also grants it voice-recording capabilities. Moreover, the whole thing is powered by a rechargeable battery, which provides a functioning time of around 15 hours.

The Sansa Clip will hit the shelves in September for around 40 US dollars (the 1 GB unit) or 60 US dollars (the 2 GB version), which makes it one of the cheapest such devices available on the market. As for its main selling point, the dimensions.....guess that the enclosed picture is worth a thousand words (note: those are a REAL coin and a REAL golf ball).

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