SanDisk e280 | A 8GB cell phone to rival the iPod

Several hours before Samsung announced its 8GB cell phone SanDisk Corporation presented its new gadget: the Sansa e280.

It is a MP3 player that distinguishes itself because of the high capacity memory that it offers out of the box, 8GB of flash-based memory. This amount of space is also expandable to 10GB (with a micro-disk expansion card) and in that case the number of songs that the Sansa e280 can hold increases to a whopping 2500.

The optional 2GB expansion card can also be inserted into a cell phone that has a microSD card slot to easily exchange music between the two gadgets. Other interesting features of the Sansa e280 are the FM radio tuner and the possibility to use it as a radio or voice recorder.

Lastly you can even edit the images or the videos stored on the Sansa e280 and this gadget comes with a 1.8” TFT color screen. The device has a replaceable Lithium Ion battery that according to SanDisk supports 20 hours of continuous use.

Being this is a clear alternative to the Apple gadgets SanDisk also added the support for several iTunes Music Store. The e280 in fact can interact with different subscription based entertainment stores. The two most important systems supported are Microsoft’s PlaysForSure and Rhapsody’s To Go and the onboard software is able to play both WMA and MP3 files.

The SanDisk gadget doubles the current capacity of the flash based iPod nano and has the same price of the bigger nano device: 249 US dollars. SanDisk was able to stuff that much memory in a gadget so “relatively” inexpensive compared to its competitors because the US corporation is itself a flash memory producer.

Speaking of prices SanDisk also announced that they will cut the prices of the other players in the e200 Series with discounts going from 40 dollars (for the 2GB e250) to 60 dollars (for the 6GB e270).