SanDisk takes aim at Shuffle, nano with Clip

It looks to be a very compelling product without the screen. Pretty cool with one. It will be interesting to see if Apple responds to this one. Costs less than a shuffle, twice the storage, plus a screen & a microphone. Wow.

Cool? It's a complete ripoff. SanDisk (and the other MP3 manufacturers) really need to reevaluate their business. They can't continue copying iPods and then throwing in a few pointless features.

Apple won't respond to this because practically no one really cares about a microphone or a teeny-tiny screen on a teeny-tiny player. I'm sure Apple will boost the storage capacity of the Shuffle when it becomes economical, but that's it.

By the way, it appears to be about twice the size of a Shuffle, so Apple's got that going for them.

That this product is lame. Instead of trying to tackle the iTunes/iPod tag-team (winner and still champion), these companies come out with plastic knock-offs that weld on 'new' features. A voice recorder? Gimme a break. I work, professionally, in a a space that requires vocie recording and dictation, and there's no way I'd ever use this for those those tasks. You want a voice recorder? Go with a dedicated, Mac-compatible device from Olympus or Sony. The screen I can do without. A shuffle with a screen is a TERRIBLE idea, and I, for one, am glad Apple didn't go that route. The tuner may actually be 'OK' for those thirsty for radio, but given the current state of the airwaves, I don't think that's the killer feature. and f1rehead was right: this model seems twice as big as a shuffle. The nano is in a completely different category altogether. -d.

Not only it's twice as big, it's over twice as thick as the shuffle (if you take the USB port as a reference to estimate the size). That's without considering the clip which looks like it can fall off any time. So actually it's probably the same thickness as the regular iPod 30gb. Not in the same class as iPod Shuffle.

i was under the impression that apple had a stranglehold on the "wheel", otherwise we'd have seen a bunch of them before this. i'm wondering if this is an actual functioning wheel or just looks like all the others with buttons.

It's not a real wheel. Just like all the other copycats it's a five button pad in the shape of a wheel.

That won't stop SanDisk from calling it a "wheel" to fool the foolish.

the wheel on my friends SanDisk works just like the ipod. its mechanical not touch. the thing that helps them is people don't realize that in some cases getting more(radio, recorder) is actually getting less(cheap product). The one thing that i don't understand is the screen... its 3 lines long. if your going through your music only seeing that much.... *shudder*

You can point to various shortcomings, but you must admit that its good for Apple to have SanDisk and others vying for the iPod space. If nothing else, it will help keep Apple's prices slightly in check.

Competition is good. And this thing is just good enough to keep Apple on its toes.

And in response to photobug, it has 3 more lines than the Shuffle. I couldn't possibly use a Shuffle because I jump around in my music quite a bit (the drawback to being a musical omnivore), plus with only 2GB of space, that list isn't going to be terribly long. Granted, I wouldn't want a screen that small on my 30GB 5G iPod. But then again, an OLED screen the same size as my current one would please me to no end. My iPod is strictly for music.