SanDisk Unveils Sansa slotMusic Player – No Bells or Whistles Here

Without a doubt, SanDisk is one of the most important flash memory manufacturers out there, but the truth of the matter is that lately it's made some more or less wrong moves on the market by trying to tackle certain market segments where its chances of success aren't exactly high. That's also the case with the company's latest initiative, the slotMusic concept, which uses microSD memory cards as content delivery vehicles.

And since no new music delivery format is complete without a player designed especially for it, SanDisk has also unveiled the Sansa slotMusic Player, a device that has been designed especially to work with this particular format (namely, to accept microSD cards filled with MP3s or DRM-free music).

According to the company's statement, the device presents itself as a stylish, all-in-one package that includes both the slotMusic card and the player, which features a favorite artist’s name and image. The branded player comes pre-loaded with an album on a 1GB slotMusic card. However, besides the slotMusic card, the MP3 player is also supposed to play songs from any microSD card with music encoded as MP3 and WMA (DRM-free only) files.

The part that’s a bit hard to understand about the Sansa slotMusic Player is its very purpose of existence. The company is already offering the Sansa View and Fuze models, both of which support the slotMusic cards quite well, so, why launch a whole new model that nobody will likely buy, simply because they prefer a device capable of providing a higher level of versatility?

Then, there's always the issue of the entire slotMusic concept. After all, within the digital download era, it's not very likely that people will prefer going to a store in order to purchase a microSD card filled with music instead of simply getting the same songs from an online service. Just look at what's happening with CDs and DVDs right now.

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