Pandora made a number of announcements tonight at a press/user event at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, which we covered earlier. Deals with Sonos and Sprint were announced that bring Pandora Internet radio into the home and to mobile devices.
They also made a pre-announcement, however, of an upcoming Wifi music player to be built by SanDisk and powered by Zing. The working prototype that CTO Tom Conrad demo’d tonight was physically similar to the Sansa Connect device launched last month with Yahoo, although it was slightly longer and thinner. The Sansa Connect device is also powered by Zing.
Few details were revealed, such as whether the device would include a hard drive. Including a hard drive would add significant cost to the product, although it would also allow music caching for periods when the user was outside of wifi coverage. They could also bundle a service that allowed users to purchase and download songs that the like, although this would also require a partnership with a third party music service.
Screen shots below. I had a few minutes to play with the device myself, but the pictures I took with my camera phone were a mess. My goal is to get a few of these to give away to TechCrunch and CrunchGear readers in the near future, even if I have to break into Zing’s offices and borrow them myself. Photo credit for bottom image goes to Brian Caldwell (his blog is here).
Pictures below. Click on top image for larger view.
