Yesterday, we mentioned SanDisk going after Apple’s Shuffle shoppers with its Sansa Express. Today, CoolTechZone.com is saying SanDisk is admittedly gunning for potential Zune buyers with its Wi-Fi-enabled Connect player.
Unfortunately, the site doesn’t do much elaborating on the topic despite apparently having talked to SanDisk about the DAP.
The story says, “in our meeting with SanDisk, the company said, “Sansa Connect is what Zune is not.” SanDisk was of course referring to the WiFi capability of the Sansa Connect.”
Is it really a surprise that SanDisk would find another use for Wi-Fi than music sharing? The Sansa Connect’s wireless abilities (Internet radio and access to PlaysForSure content for example) are certainly more immediately useful than the Zune’s social-networking feature. I doubt that’s up for debate even. But just because a manufacturer adds a feature to a device, does that automatically mean it’s “going after” another product with a similar feature? Yeah, no.
And not to get nitpicky here (but I’m a bit of a dick skunk so I will), the site incorrectly states that Microsoft had the first Wi-Fi-enabled music player. MusicGremlin had one out early in 2006 and that wasn’t even the first one. My point being that there is plenty of room for growth and innovation yet to come in the DAP market. Not everything is a Zune/iPod killer.