SanDisk’s Sansa line has long been one of the few success stories in media players that doesn’t involve products with “Apple” in the name. The company managed to quietly sell enough players to become the second most successful player in the category, and it apparently continues to do well enough to make introducing new models worth its while.

But SanDisk has never really tried to go head-to-head with Apple. It’s focused on cheap, simple models which seem to cheerfully acknowledge that they’re not going to outdo Steve Jobs’ brainchildren when it comes to pure style. Sansa models compete relatively with the iPod with some success by not competing with the iPod.

To greater or lesser degrees, nearly every non-Apple tablet released to date has tried to out-iPad the iPad. They’ve adopted similar industrial design and interfaces, offered theoretically superior specs and features, and sold for prices in the same ballpark. It hasn’t worked. (Just ask HP.) Already, the market is piling up with deadwood that failed to answer the question “Why should somebody buy this instead of an iPad?“

Maybe what we need is a tablet that has a Sensa, um, sensibility–one which aims for a low price, offers some appealing capabilities in a competent fashion without getting wildly ambitious, and is widely available at big-name retailers. And maybe it’s most likely to come from a company that isn’t a direct Apple competitor. (The likes of Sony and Samsung have had more trouble with media players than SanDisk, a company mostly devoted to making storage devices, not consumer electronics.)

Two contenders spring to mind. One is Vizio’s Android tablet, which sells for under $300, has a smaller-than-the-iPad 8″ screen and basic specs, and comes with features designed to let you use it as a universal remote. I haven’t tried it for myself yet, but SlashGear’s Rue Liu gave it a reasonably positive review. And then there’s Amazon’s unannounced tablet. We don’t know anything about it for sure yet, but rumors point to it being cheaper and simpler than the iPad.

Slate’s Farhad Manjoo has some thoughts on cheaper, simpler iPad competitors in general and the Amazon one in particular.

I already own and like an iPad 2, but I’m looking forward to somebody–anybody–figuring out how to make a tablet that large numbers of rational people choose over an iPad. I don’t suppose that SanDisk has given any thought to getting into the market?

Microsoft started allowing external storage on the Xbox 360 last month. Although any flash drive or hard drive will do, Microsoft promised its own solution was forthcoming, and pretty much everyone assumed correctly that it wouldn’t be cheap.

In exchange for the hefty markup, you get a month of Xbox Live Gold (an $8 value) and plug-and-play support, which means you don’t have to format the drive using the console’s interface. I’d take the money.

But don’t blame Microsoft for thinking its brand name commands a premium. This is an industry tradition that predates the current console generation.

For instance, NewEgg sells a two-pack of 8 MB memory cards for the Playstation 2 for $34. A single, $30 card from Intec holds four times the data of both official cards combined. When I was in high school, I remember getting a similar deal on Nintendo 64 memory, with a third-party memory pack that cost roughly the same as the official model, but with four times the capacity.

Console makers aren’t the only ones who charge more than they should for storage. A 4 GB SanDisk Memory Stick Pro Duo for the PSP costs $35 at GameStop. The same exact product is $24 on Amazon and $19 on NewEgg. GameStop also plans to charge an extra $5 for the 8 GB Xbox 360 USB stick.

If you’re reading this blog, I have a feeling you’re tech-savvy enough to shop around and avoid the games industry’s storage shenanigans. Microsoft did good by allowing non-proprietary memory on the Xbox 360, but the availability of cheap USB sticks highlights the silliness of charging high premiums for branding.

4GB iPhone? I remain dubious.

Acer to build Android notebook.

DoJ: remote DVRs are legal.

SanDisk’s SD card for netbooks.

World’s. Cutest. Digital. Audio. Player.

Foveon? They’re still in existence?

Coming soon: more Twitter spam.

Blu-Ray in a portable package.

Like the T-List? Read it as a feed.

SanDisk presumably sees slotMusic (whose site, incidentally, barely mentions SanDisk) as an opportunity to sell millions more flash cards a year. For consumers, though, I’m not sure if the format passes the “why?” test. Here’s SanDisk’s pitch:

“slotMusic cards enable consumers to instantly and easily enjoy music from their favorite artists without being dependent on a PC or internet connection. Users simply insert the slotMusic card into their microSD-enabled mobile phone or MP3 player to hear the music – without passwords, downloading or digital-rights-management interfering with their personal use.”

Okay, so if I’m in Best Buy and see some music that looks irresistible, I can buy it and be listening within moments. If I bought a CD, I’d have to rip and transfer it; if I bought from an online store like iTunes or Rhapsody, I’d have to transfer.

But slotMusic’s instant gratification seems overwhelmed but its downsides, and by upsides of other music formats that it doesn’t have:

–The slotMusic cards are a gigabyte but contain only one album, requiring you to either swap them in and out of your phone each time you listen (clumsy!) or transfer songs off of the card (also clumsy, but in a different way!);

–Owning and managing multiple MicroSD cards sounds like a hassle; many phones aren’t really designed to have you swapping cards frequently, and any card that’s the size of your fingernail will inevitably get lost;

–If I had to choose between a format that offers instant gratification for 29 albums and one that offered slightly-delayed gratification for millions of ‘em, it’s an easy choice;

–When all is said and done, isn’t it more convenient to download music from home then to have to shlep to Best Buy, anyhow?

I’m joining the chorus of conventional wisdom here (here are slams from TechCrunch and GigaOm), which is always dangerous. SanDisk is a smart company–who’d have ever guessed that a memory-card manufacturer would end up in second place to Apple as an MP3 player manufacturer, leaving Sony, Samsung, and Creative in the dust? Then again, its earlier foray into putting content on flash storage, the Fanfare TV service, was a resounding flop, and the company killed it within months of its introduction.

Me, I’m unlikely to pick up any albums on slotMusic until you can buy obscure 1960s bubblegum music on it. And come to think of it, much of the music I buy isn’t available in digital format at all yet.

Here’s my comparison of slotMusic and the good ol’ Compact Disc. And it’s time for a poll:

]]> http://technologizer.com/2008/09/22/the-world-probably-doesnt-need-slotmusic/feed/ 1 Harry McCracken slotmusic