Avoid the stampede at Walmart next Friday by picking up that Memorex Blu-ray player for $149 at Buy.com (free shipping, too). While you’re at it, you can also get the first-gen iPod Shuffle-like Sandisk Sansa Express for $10.99 (refurbished).

Hurry, though. These things are going to sell out quickly.

LINK [Buy.com]

Oooh, that’s a good deal. Woot.com has the 2GB SanDisk Sansa Clip (see our review here) for a paltry $15.99 + $5 shipping. It’s refurbished, yes, but come on: you could spend on coffee, donuts, smokes, and sodie pop before you even make it into work. Why not pick up a little MP3 player instead? Makes a great stocking stuffer, too.

Sandisk Clip 2GB MP3 Player [Woot.com]

Quick Version: Starting at under $40, the Sansa Clip from SanDisk makes an excellent wearable MP3 player if you’re looking for something small that still has plenty of features.

Read More

I like Sansa media players.  I always have.  They’re not quite as sexy as Apple iPods, and they’re not that much cheaper, really.  The reason I like the Sansa players is because they don’t require any special software on my computer — heck, the review model I received contained only the player itself and the USB cable: no software CD at all!  As a GNU/Linux user, I really enjoy being able to connect a Sansa player to my computer and have it immediately recognized as any other USB media.  I can simply drag-and-drop media files into the proper directory, and they’re ready to play.  And I can easily use a Sansa device in lieu of a USB memory stick, if necessary.  But enough about my personal preferences: let’s take a look at the Sansa View 16GB.

Read More

My good friend Peter Ha isn’t sold on the Sandisk SlotMusic hoopla (see his post here). I think it’ll work, though. You have to approach it from the mindset of the casual consumer for it to make sense. Think of the player like a Walkman or a Discman and MicroSD cards as blank tapes or CDs. Then remember that entire albums used to be sold on tapes and CDs and that for many people, there’s a certain comfort in being able to drop a piece of media into a hardware player and have it just work.

Read More

Looking for an inexpensive MP3 player to use for working out, showing off to tourists, and/or other general merriment?

Buy.com has the SanDisk Sansa Shaker for the low, low price of $14.99, which includes free shipping. Being that it’s a SanDisk product, there’s an SD slot that you can use to expand upon the 1GB of storage that comes standard.

The Shaker has a built-in speaker, two headphone jacks, and song changing is handled simply by shaking the device. You can also change tracks and regulate the volume by twisting the white bands on the top and bottom of the device. The regular price for the Shaker is around $50, so this deal might not last all that long.

SanDisk Sansa Shaker 1GB [Buy.com] via FatWallet

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

Those of you who like the feeling of a tangible object that holds your music purchases might be interested in what SanDisk is planning with its microSD cards.

It’s giving away a free microSD card loaded up with 55 music tracks with the purchase of a new 8GB Sansa Fuze player.

The company’s expected to announce more content offerings in the future. It could work, too, since microSD slots can be found on all sorts of digital music players and cell phones. The 12GB cards can hold two full-length movies with room to spare.

Read More

We first caught wind of the Fuze last week and now it’s official. The 4GB Fuze will come in red for now, we assume more colors will be available, and will retail for $100. The little PMP features a 1.9-inch screen, digital FM radio, voice recording and a microSD/SDHC slot. Battery life, according to Amazon, puts the Fuze at 24-hours for audio and 5-hours of video playback. $100 sounds like a good deal for a PMP that you can expand out thanks to the microSDHC slot, but a 1.9-inch screen isn’t going to get anyone all riled up. No confirmed ship date, but it’s said to ship within 1 to 3 months.

Amazon

While it’s not official, SanDisk is getting ready to launch a new mid-market PMP called the Fuze. Aimed at the 3rd generation iPod Nano, the Fuze will be an SSD-based tiny-screen having PMP that appears to have almost all the same features as the iPod Nano, plus an FM radio, but with more storage, possibly up to 16GB.

So far, SanDisks PMPs have been pretty decent, I’ve had a Sansa for awhile and it’s a great alternative to the iPod. You contrarians should have love in your hearts for this device.

SanDisk Sansa Fuze in the Makings? [Anything but iPod]

Remember last year’s WrestleMania 23, when Vince McMahon lost a hair vs. hair match against Donald Trump? (There’s the clip to refresh your memory.) OK, so it was Bobby Lashley vs. Umaga, but you know what I mean. Take that scenario—a hair vs. hair match, very popular in Mexican lucha libre—and apply it to the sales of the Microsoft Zune 2 and the Sansa series of PMPs. Now this is exciting.

The spokeswoman for Sansa, Carm Lyman, has challenged her counterpart at Microsoft to a hair vs. hair match. If the Zune overtakes Sansa’s position as the number two (market share-wise) PMP company in the U.S. behind Apple this holiday season, she’ll shave her head. Bald. Bald bald. Calvo. (Well, calva in her case.) The Microsoft guy, Robbie Bach, has yet to accept her challenge.

If this were really pro wrestling, Bach’s honor would be on the line. Then the lights would turn off, Mr. Lyman would run in from the crowd and smash Bach in the face with a chair or other everyday object. Maybe a Zune 1, that giant monstrosity?

Carm from Sandisk ups ante; will shave her head too if Microsoft’s Zune makes it to #2 [Zdent]

Don’t want your music-loving 8- to 11-year-old running around with an iPod? SanDisk targets “tweens” with its new Sansa Shake — a kid-friendly player that stores music on Secure Digital memory cards and runs on one triple-A battery. Best of all, it’s pretty darn cheap, at just $39.99, including a 512MB SD card. Older kids may not be impressed by the Shaker’s size and features, but I had a tough time getting it back from two 8-year-olds I lent it to.

Read More

My favorite trend in MP3 players and music-phones is the inclusion of a slot for a ridiculously tiny microSD card. There’s just something really cool about taking a 2GB memory card out of my LG Chocolate phone and putting it into my SanDisk Sansa e280. But high-capacity memory cards also have the potential to resolve thorny issues related to digital music sharing — especially across your own devices.

MP3 players have had expansion slots for years, but until now they supported a max of only 2 extra gigabytes on top of the built-in memory. Well, according to a new spec, those fingernail-size microSD cards can now hit up to 32GB–enough to warrant rethinking the role of flash memory in an MP3 player. Luckily, cell phone and digicam makers provide plenty of inspiration!

Read More

Looks like Sansa’s Connect is essentially an OEM product out of Taiwan because Pandora is showing off a rebadged device to showcase its wireless streaming products. No real information on this thing, but TechCrunch got some screenshots and pictures. I wouldn’t expect Pandora to actually launch this device — it’s a proof of concept, kind of like the Music Gremlin eventually became. Pandora is quite popular and I suspect a device with wireless service would be just peachy… but this ain’t it.

Read the rest at TechCrunch…

Thanks to the Copyright Royalty Board, beginning in mid-July, all Internet radio stations will see substantially higher royalty fees. Fees so high, that it isn’t difficult to imagine vast swaths of the musical Internet becoming dead air overnight.

Most frightening of all is the prospect of losing Pandora — one of the truly great things to come from the entire Interweb. I had the opportunity to interview Pandora founder Tim Westergren about a year ago, and the way he put it, the service is purely a labor of love born from his affection for expanding his own musical palette.

Right now. Pandora is under siege. In order to survive, it will likely have to evolve. And it will have to go mobile.
Read More

Just a reminder: We’re also giving away two little devices that many of you are eager to get your greasy paws on: the Sansa Connect from SanDisk. Make the jump for full details: Read More

People have been clamoring for WiFi-enabled music players for a long time now. But current offerings from Archos, Microsoft, and SanDisk make it seem like they’re all just taking weak jabs at Apple, like when George McFly goes to deck Biff in Back To the Future and just lands a wimpy blow on his shoulder.

The big blunder is simple: keeping social WiFi (sharing music) and productivity WiFi (browsing, email) apart like two fighting kids. I may not be the sharpest spoon in the drawer, but even I can figure out that you can only score a truly big hit by incorporating both.
Read More

The Sansa Connect is the newest MP3 player to appear on the SanDisk roster of DAPs. The device stirred quite a bit of clamor at this year’s CES due to its innovative use of WiFi and affordable pricing.It’s been three full months since the device was first announced, but I now have one in my possession and have had an opportunity to test it out amply. So was it worth the wait?
Read More