SanDisk reinvents 1980s personal stereo for the noughties

SanDisk has continued with plans to replace the CD with the SD, by launching a portable music player based around its pre-loaded Micro SD card notion. The Sansa SlotMusic Player is designed to take the storage firm’s SlotMusic cards, unveiled last month. Fortunately, it also accepts so-called “self-loaded” Micro SD cards …

[Anonymous Coward]

UK Price.

Of course its already been decided...It'll be whatever the US price is, with a pound sign instead of a dollar.

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh how cool !

Do they do one shaped like a Pepsi Cola tin ?

What about one mounted in ludicrously large headphones for when out roller-skating?

Won't it be fun carrying all those cards around? The envy of all your friends who only have Ipods...... hmmmm

[Ed Deckard]

Seriously?

"SanDisk will initially release the player into the US for $35 (£20/€25) - each pre-loaded SD card costs $15 (£16/€20)."

You guys are getting -screwed- on the SD card price.

[Anonymous Coward]

Own content

Anyone know what format this plays - i.e. can I just stick my own mp3s on a micro SD card? If so - and if it supports sdhc then this looks pretty cool..

I could save on my phone's battery life by simply plugging the card from my phone into this to listen to music..

[Storm Cloud]

seriously?

£16 for an album!

Oh yeah because we've all been crying out for a way in which we can pay double for our music.

And what a brilliant idea to change from having all our music pre-loaded and easily searchable to splitting it up on to separate, losable, breakable cards.

Can't wait for all the extras like artwork which will be very useful on a device with no screen.

Absolute winner!

Mine's the one with empty bottle of scotch.

[Nigel Wright]

I can't see this taking off

Who is going to want to have a bunch of memory cards in their pocket?

Who is going to want to pay £16 for an album in compressed format when a CD with uncompressed music can be bought for less than a £10?

I would much rather have an 8GB or larger mp3 player loaded with my tunes ripped from my own CD collection. I cannot see any merit in this idea.

[Tom]

wtf?

FAIL.

[Calum Morrison]

Bunch of arse.

Will this be in the bargain bins before or after Christmas? This is only any use for kids or promotional tat. An utterly crap idea; does anyone want to carry media disks or cards around with them again?

[M]

"More Fail, Vicar?"

Preloaded, sub-cd quality music didn't really help the minidisc. This might find a niche market for people sorting out their own mem cards but this is bound for market failure eventually.

[Anonymous Coward]

Thicke?

Is it just a coincidence that the promo pic has the player pre-branded for the 'thicke' market?

Seriously, £16 for an album? You could buy a memory card and all the songs from iTunes for less than that!

[Anonymous Coward]

Now do the HD movie version..

and BluRay is dead....

Long Live la flash.

[Andy]

Smaller?

I could see this could work if the damn thing wasn't so big; look at the size of it compared to the SD card that goes in it!

If you could make it about the same size (or smaller) as an Apple Shuffle then you have an mp3 player with a capacity limited only be the number of media cards you want to lug around. If it can handle high capacity media cards then you'd only need perhaps a couple and you'd have a fairly flexible little player.

In it's current form though, what's the point?

[Joe K]

Where did i put that album?

Have you seen those things, they're TINY.

So much as inhale near them and you can swallow them without noticing.

You'd lose albums by the bucketload. Those little cards should be stored inside a phone or something and never touched again.

[TeeCee]

Compressed?

These are 1Gb cards, right? Whatever format it's in could quite easily be one of the lossless ones and the results would still leave room for the added tat (sorry, valuable free extras).

Oh, and it doesn't say that the UK price hasn't been *decided* it says it hasn't been *recorded*. Presumably they've yet to put it on a slotmusic card so they can release it.

Mine's the one with the memory card in the pocket holding a sound clip of some bloke shouting "Twenty nine pounds and ninety-nine pence".

[Anonymous Coward]

Epic Fail - yet oh so close...

@ Ed Deckard: I don't know where the £16 came from , the article says £8.60. You reeled a few in though!

Fail - No display.

Fail - No navigation apart from skip forwards and back. Try navigating through even 2 GB of music with just skip...

Fail - Pre-loaded cards with one album plus a load of ego-barf from the likes of Katy Perry, Coldplay and Robin Thicke? Double-plus Fail.

If this is the music industry's idea of the future then I'm buying a banjo.

Now, if this was an updated M series with a card slot, taking MicroSD's yet retaining the clean simple design and AAA battery power then I'd be in the queue.

Flogging these things must seem like robbing thickies to Sandisk...

[Anonymous Coward]

Cards are OK... but...

I've got an MP3 player with a card slot, but for a particular reason:

My music player is not just a music player!

Language courses, OU CDs, news podcasts etc etc etc all find their way into the little box. The seperation of music and non-music means I don't have the annoying music-followed-by-random-lesson-in-German thing happening when I'm on the train. However, I see no similar need for the separation of music from music, so I see no need for preloaded cards.

[Kev K]

Here's an idea

Instead of sd cards why not have a USB drive that you can load say 2 to 10 gb of mp3's do some electronic wizardry so you can plug some headphones into it and listen direct??

THEN when your bored of those songs you put your music player into a spare USB slot to recharge the player and swap songs out from your extensive (legal of course) downloaded collection

I think I may patent that idea - its bound to be cheap & easy and not look like an ipuke

What a crappy idea for a player and a crappy price for an album

[The Fuzzy Wotnot]

Pre-loaded with what?

Hmmm, I'm sure they cater for us niche music lovers? Can't wait for them to release the Gorguts Hits or the Best of Onslaught and Desecration compilations!

So why is this supposedly better than my knackered old 80GB Archos which I can load with vids, music even data files straight from any device that can read/write FAT32 over a USB socket?

[Dan Salter]

Why?

Words almost fail me. How can a group of what must be fairly bright people come up with an idea like this and possibly think it might be succesful in a post-iPod world?

How could they possibly imagine people might be convinced to pay £16 for something they can either download for free or get from iTunes for £7? Have they learnt nothing from the last 10 years of music biz decline?

They might as well go out to the car park of their factory and burn several million dollars and save a lot of people a lot of effort. Madness!

[A J Stiles]

Got FAIL written all over it

This thing has got FAIL written all over it.

The whole essential point of the cassette Walkman was that you could record the media yourself, at home. Your favourite tracks, from your favourite albums, on one C-90.

[Edward Rose]

SD card storage?

It should be easy enough to put a small form factor storage compartment on the actual device for your spare cards (that's if Sandisk actually think about it).

~50hr battery life, with an easy to replace cell, and I'd be interested.

Small form factor, simple display, good battery life. If you don't like lots of separate cards (which I do - don't ask) shove a single biggun' in. Include a smallish amount of internal and you could allow 'hot swapping' of files between mates. For legit stuff only though, obviously. That's assuming they want to do a custom design just for me!

"$15 (£16/€20)"

I know it's been corrected in the article, but please folks, what's in the brackets is clearly el'reg's doing and not a genuine price. Go by the $, as they clearly state UK prices aren't recorded (whatever that means).

[Jolyon Ralph]

Oh shit, I sneezed and lost my album

What a piece of crap.

MicroSD cards are tiny, who the hell wants to have a bunch of those swapping around.

All I see is pointlessness.

[andy gibson]

Nothing New

I had one of these that ran off SD / MMC cards about five years ago. Only cost £20 too.

[Anonymous Coward]

The 90's called...

...they want their personal music player back.

[Mike Kamermans]

@Kev K

That... already exists. Has for years. Even apple's already made one of those: the early ipod shuffle models were literally just that.. a big USB stick with a controls button, a plug for earphones at the top, and a usb plug at the bottom.

[druck]

Too small

Micro SD cards are far too small for practical use, being far too easy to lose. They are meant for installing in mobile phones and leaving there.

[Anonymous Coward]

HAHAHAHAHA, I bet...

...it comes with a proprietary headphone and USB socket as well.

Need I really say the 'F' word?

[Anonymous Coward]

@ Kev K

Already out, my brother owns one, makes the drive clunky and long though, to accommodate the battery and headphone electronics etc.

This thing wouldn't be so bad if it had a screen and inbuilt high capacity flash storage drive, which would give the option to download the album card to internal storage when plugged into to the player or just to play the music.

[Anonymous Coward]

Size

Not that I would mind an SD card, but the micro is too small for practical use. If the music were completely un-compressed and the card would last as long as a cd, then I would have no problem switching. My problem stems from dealing with my mom and other 'older' relatives trying to keep up with all this small stuff. They can barely read the small print now.

Seriously, I have to buy hardware based on how simple a remote is (Very few good all-in-one remotes with nice big buttons and easy to explain setup) for them. It's not stupidity on their part, just old age and bad eyes. For some reason, my mom thinks pressing "TV" should turn on the tv, not "Component" (I'm already being punished with the change-over from analog to digital signals). CD's are about as small as my mom is getting and my grandfather only uses the cd's that I get him (still loves his albums with all the snap, crackle and pop).

I really hope this small format fails and a more reasonably sized one pops up. Eventually, my eyes are going to go bad and I don't think my younger relatives (being raised in their short attention span culture) are going to want to spend the time to explain what's on each little card that I own and help me find some small slot on a console.

[Martin Usher]

So explain to me why this is better than my phone and Bluetooth headphones?

Kind of a weird product, as if some senior manager in marketing's got a bee in his (her) bonnet about something.

I definitely won't be buying one. I've got an older Sandisk music player that uses a USB stick (fine except it only uses their stick) and its been mostly superceeded by my cellphone -- plays music and makes phone calls.

[Ed Deckard]

@ Epic Fail

"@ Ed Deckard: I don't know where the £16 came from , the article says £8.60. You reeled a few in though!"

It came straight from the article, which may have been altered since then.

[Anonymous Coward]

This Can Only Be A Good Thing

Millions of unemployed Japanese rice-grain painters can now find work doing SD cover art. At this time of global financial crisis, the world *desperately* needs these new industries.

You vile naysayers ought to be ashamed.