Report Claims SanDisk the No. 2 Seller of MP3 Players

I think that Sandisk is going to hold on to that no. 2 position. DailyTech earlier reported that SanDisk was going to expand its line of MP3 players to include several new flash-based MP3 players. Although the Sansa line will not be released until later next month, Mercury News repots SanDisk has moved into the No. 2 spot in the MP3 player market. The company sold over a million music players in the last holiday quarter, while Apple, the top supplier of MP3 players worldwide, selling 14 million iPods during the holiday period.

It will be interesting to see how Creative responds to SanDisk now being the No. 2 spot.

From my experiencce with my Sansa m250, I can say that they know what a consumer wants. It was on sale at Best Buy for $129, and I see it online for $120-140. This thing has:

-2GB flash memory
-shows up as mass storage drive or recognized as audio player depending on setting on the player
-can use purely as a 2GB USB drive, no software required on winXP
-runs on one regular AAA battery for 19 hours
-FM tuner with 20 presets
-NO synch software required (automatic builds music library from song tags)
-plays mp3 (even high bitrate), wma, wma-drm, and audible
-has MS "Plays for sure" certification
-built-in microphone records 16k WAV files
-sleep timer
-backlight (stops working after battery drops to 33%)
-comes with cheap plastic cover and arm band
-black and white display showing artist/song/album/track no/Kbps
-comes with 8-inch USB cable, perfect for carrying with you

That is pretty much everything one could want in a flash player. The headphones are even decent quality (earbud type). The only negative thing is that it is offically windows only. But since you can make the player act completely like a "mass storage device" flash drive, I assume that it could be made to work with Linux and OSX. But I could be wrong.

Personally, I also wish it had FM recording, so I can record NPR shows (like TOTN: Science Friday). I know that is a very unusual feature. And with more and more shows having podcasts available, it doesn't really matter as much.