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Sandisk Press Conference: New Media Players and Memory Devices
Tuesday, Rich and I grabbed a quick press core freebie lunch and rushed to stand in line for the Sandisk press conference. We were told by our Sandisk contact the night before at Pepcom that Sandisk had some exciting news to announce. Yeah, yeah, yeah!every company has "exciting news" to announce at CES. With the disappointment of the pathetically uninformative Pioneer press conference fresh in our minds, we weren't that overjoyed to hear any more exciting news. But then the Sandisk rep told us they would be giving out MP3 players to the first 100 or so attendees!so we ended up in the Sandisk press conference line.    But for once the exciting news actually turned out to be exciting AND news. Sandisk was announcing a whole slew of new products for 2007 with a heavy bias towards portable media players. Although, being Sandisk, they also had some innovative memory products. Notably their work on solid state drives (SSDs) for notebook computers. Earlier this week Sandisk announce a 32GB SSD 1.8" drive meant to replace standard hard drives. The UATA 5000 is currently available to original equipment manufacturers and should be popping up in notebooks soon. An impressive video of sub-40 second Vista boot up times followed. Even more impressive was the time-lapsed video of a SSD Vista boot up followed by a drop-shock test and subsequent re-install of the SSD and re-boot of Vista.   One of the products Sandisk will be launching later in '07 is their USB TV media recorder. Basically the premise of this device is that you can drag and drop videos to Sandisk's USB TV flash drive, unplug the storage media from your PC and plug it into a TV and watch your videos. The USB storage device rests in a cradle that also doubles a remote used to play/pause, fast forward or rewind your show. USB TV should be hitting the US market sometime in Q2 of this year with an estimated $300 price point.  Moving along into the portable media market leads us to the gadgets we were most impressed with. First off was Sandisk's answer to the iPod Shuffle. Sandisk has actually been making quite an impression with their e200 series of flash-based media players. The e200 player was 2nd only to the iPod in 2006 and now it seems they are ready to take on the iPod's little brother. Sandisk's Express MP3 player is slightly larger than the new Shuffle, but has the same capacity, more features and includes a four line LED display. The Express plugs directly into a standard USB port and even includes a microSD expansion slot just like its c200 and e200 siblings making the 1GB Sansa Express expandable up to 3GB. And all of this for around $60 coming this March. Our favorite Sandisk release of the press conference was their wireless Sansa Connect internet MP3 player. Wireless connectivity is all the rage with the Zune and other media players now featuring internet access. Sandisk's Connect is a wi-fi enabled media player that can pull down streaming radio as well as access online photo galleries and music recommendation services. The idea sounds much like the Zune's share feature, but will no doubt be less annoying.  The Sansa Connect player uses software from a company by the name of Zing (www.zing.net). Zing specializes in the ability to share, find and collect your favorite music. Rich was able to see the Sansa Connect in action at the Zing booth. The heart of the Zing software is all about sharing. Because the device is Wifi enabled and plays internet radio, it enables you to discover new music. Choosing a radio station is just like any other, but when listening, you are able to have the device find ten songs which are similar to one you are listening to. The device will go out to the internet and download them in the background. These will be added to your player for listening later. It isn't just songs you can either, as the Sansa Connect has enabled Flickr functionality. You are able to view images hosted by Flickr.com, thereby allowing you the ability to have large numbers of pictures available without having to fill your player.  Another part of the software enables you to have friends and suggest music back and forth. The device knows when others are online. You can receive suggestions from friends or you can send them suggestions. By the way, there is no limit to the number of times you can play suggested tracks. They are downloaded from the other person's player or sent to the other player without play restriction. I do believe that part of it is based on a subscription model. We will have to wait until we can have one of our very own to test to give a good review of its software. The 4 GB Sansa Connect will be hitting shelves in March at an MSRP of $249. And, as you've probably guessed by now, the Connect also features a microSD expansion slot!and Sandisk will be happy to sell you a 2 GB expansion card should you need it.  But wait, there's more. Last on the portable media player new release list is the Sansa View. Less a music device, the View is a palm-sized movie player with a large 4" screen in a 16x9 aspect ratio. The 8 GB flash memory can store up to 33 hours of video, 2000 songs and thousands of pictures. The large screen eats up battery time but a removable Li-Polymer battery provides 4 hours of continuous video playback. The View supports Sandisk TrustedFlash cards as well as the new SD High Capacity (SDHC) cards. Music subscription services will be supported through Windows Plays For Sure and the video player is designed to be sync'd with Windows Media Player 10 or 11 and will work with Vista, of course. Expect to pay around $300 this spring for the Sansa View.  You can watch the press conference in its entirety on Sandisk's website here: http://www.sandisk.com/Corporate/PressRoom/PressReleases/ 
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