Posted on Thursday, January 08 2009 @ 0:00 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
SanDisk released its Sansa slotRadio player and companion line of slotRadio music cards. The SanDisk Sansa slotRadio is a small $99.99 digital audio player with a 1.5" OLED display, it comes bundled with a slotRadio card preloaded with 1,000 songs from the Billboard charts. Additional, 1,000 song, genre-specific and themed slotRadio cards will be sold separately at $39.99. The Sansa slotRadio also features an FM radio.
“slotRadio’s unprecedented simplicity will have even the most time-pressed music fans enjoying a huge range of music in no time,” said Daniel Schreiber, senior vice president and general manager, SanDisk. “1,000 handpicked songs in your pocket with zero downloads makes enjoying digital music easier than ever. Never before has music been this accessible.”
The immediacy of the plug-and-play model offered by the card-plus-player format ushers in a new way for consumers to enjoy music. To date, portable music devices typically required software installations, followed by time-consuming music selection and file-by-file downloading, topped off with cable connections and synchronization.
“slotRadio dramatically lowers these barriers, offering a genuine alternative to existing options,” said Noam Kedem, vice president of product management, SanDisk. “This makes slotRadio a perfect player for the pressed-for-time mom, the harried traveler, the can’t-stop-now fitness fanatic, as well as anyone who just wants to kick back and discover new songs, or re-discover a timeless favorite.”
The player comes bundled with a slotRadio mix card containing 1,000 songs. It features a variety of playlists from Billboard’s charts, including rock, contemporary, country, and others organized into themes such as “chillout,” “workout” and more. While songs cannot be removed from the card, users can easily navigate between the playlists, and skip through songs at the press of a button.
"slotRadio offers a uniquely uncomplicated portable digital music experience, combining the music discovery aspects of radio with consumer choice in genre selection," said Susan Kevorkian, Program Director, Consumer Markets at IDC. "Solutions like slotRadio that offer competitively priced, straightforward new ways to acquire and interact with music will play a key role in driving demand among new and existing digital music device and service users as those markets continue to evolve."
