Yes, indeed, SanDisk has a vested interest in people buying removable storage cards, seeing as how the company makes its money by selling memory. However, SanDisk’s Jan Hauer – director of product marketing – made an interesting prediction in London earlier today. Hauer predicted that, eventually, MP3 players won’t be outfitted with memory at all. They’ll all use removable storage cards. So will most other devices that play music, too. So you’d be able to take your memory card between your MP3 player, your computer, your car, and your home stereo, for instance.
Granted, you can already do that with many devices nowadays, but Hauer’s prediction is that you’ll be able to do that with all devices someday. Thanks to Moore’s Law, you’ll be able to keep doubling your storage for the same price every year without having to buy all new gadgets because they’d all just take the same removable media.
SanDisk also announced that its Sansa Clip and Fuze players would be getting Ogg Vorbis and FLAC file support via a soon-to-be-released firmware upgrade and that all SanDisk digital audio players from now on would contain FM radios.
via The Register
i think this makes a whole lot of sense – adding the memory card slot in a portable player. when i got my fuze, i was happy to know that i could interchange the memory card i have on my nikon d80 (and as coincidence would have it, my d80 also accepts sdhc cards – i just have to have the microsd-SD adapter with me, that’s all). sometimes, when i run out of memory from shoots, i use the memory card from my fuze as an emergency back-up. i mostly use it on commutes and late in the weekday afternoon – it is a welcome distraction. i can vouch for over 20 hours of audio playing time, but i had that on full most of the time on a sennheiser hd202 so…
I’ve a Sansa Fuze player, and have to admit, that it rose above all of my expectation. A truly masterpiece.