SanDisk released a new Sansa digital audio player which offers 8GB of storage capacity for $249. The company says the player cost the same as the iPod nano 4GB but offers twice the storage capacity.
Prices for Sansa players with 2, 4 and 6 gigabytes of storage were cut by as much as 30 percent to a range of about $140 to $220.
"The most costly ingredient in a flash-based (music) player is the flash memory," said Eric Bone, director of audio/video product marketing at SanDisk. "Since we make the flash memory, we essentially remove the middleman and pass that savings directly to the consumer."