SanDisk announces two new Sansa c200 players

Friday, September 01, 2006

Continuing in its quest to take away market shares from Apple today SanDisk announced two other portable music players. After launching less than two weeks ago an >8GB cell phone to rival the iPod the flash memory manufacturer has now introduced the Sansa c200 players.

The gadgets will be available both in the US and in Europe starting from October and thanks to the SanDisk advantage in the flash market are pretty cheap for their capacity. The two versions in fact, the Sansa c240 (1GB) and the Sansa c250 (2GB), are priced respectively 80 and 100 US dollars.

Considering that the 1GB version of the iPod shuffle costs 99 US dollars with the same amount of money you get a gadget with twice the capacity. Besides if you want to extend the memory at your disposal to store your music or pictures you only have to add a microSD card to insert in the available slot on the Sansa players.

Apart from the considerable (for the price) space you also get a 1.4-inch LCD screen, a voice recorder, a FM recorder and a FM tuner to listen to your favorite radio.

According to Sansa the included lithium battery will last up to 15 hours of continuous playback. The battery is rechargeable and if you for some reason you want to you can easily replace it.

As for the supported music formats the Sansa c200 players will be able to read MP3, WMA and protected DRM music files plus JPEG pictures.

The gadget is compatible with the Microsoft Windows PlaysForSure certification so it will support subscription services like Napster, Rhapsody and Yahoo! Music.

Lastly this gadget is very slim compared to some other SanDisk players because it measures only 0.6 by 1.3 by 3.1 inches (it weighs 43 grams with the battery).

Despite their little size the Sansa c200 devices will certainly be a big player in this market and now it is up to Apple to answer.