The control pad’s now square instead of round and there’s a microSD expansion slot included for good measure, so you’ll be able to add up to 16 extra gigabytes if you like. At around 15 hours, battery life seems to be about the same as before and there’s still a built-in FM tuner, voice recorder, and extended file support (MP3, FLAC, Ogg, Audible, Rhapsody, etc.). The player also supports SanDisk’s new slotRadio initiative.

The Clip+ will be available starting tomorrow in 2GB, 4GB, and 8GB for $40, $50, and $70, respectively.

Product Page [SanDisk via CNET]

As king of the hill, Apple has nowhere to go but down. They need to continue to improve on their core offering, which will make them necessarily averse to taking too many risks with new product features or functionality. SanDisk, on the other hand, can afford to be a little more freewheeling — if not outright unconventional — with their features and functions, because they have room to move up the totem pole.

The Sansa line isn’t even SanDisk’s core product: that would be their flash memory business, from which they earn substantial revenues from patent licensing. So SanDisk has even more latitude to get funky in the portable music player market. Sometimes being #2 ain’t so bad.

Via CNN Money.

Here’s a little demo of the SanDisk Sansa slotRadio player that we reported earlier. The basic gist is a $99 player loaded up with 1000 songs spanning various genres. You can also buy genre-specific microSD cards for $39.99 that come with 1000 songs too. Think of it as the lazy man’s MP3 player. You can load up your own microSD card if you’re feeling ambitious, but most would-be purchasers will likely stick to being spoon-fed the music. I can already see these things sitting in airport vending machines.

[PSGallery=1lxaa2k3tu]

Avoid the stampede at Walmart next Friday by picking up that Memorex Blu-ray player for $149 at Buy.com (free shipping, too). While you’re at it, you can also get the first-gen iPod Shuffle-like Sandisk Sansa Express for $10.99 (refurbished).

Hurry, though. These things are going to sell out quickly.

LINK [Buy.com]

Oooh, that’s a good deal. Woot.com has the 2GB SanDisk Sansa Clip (see our review here) for a paltry $15.99 + $5 shipping. It’s refurbished, yes, but come on: you could spend on coffee, donuts, smokes, and sodie pop before you even make it into work. Why not pick up a little MP3 player instead? Makes a great stocking stuffer, too.

Sandisk Clip 2GB MP3 Player [Woot.com]

Quick Version: Starting at under $40, the Sansa Clip from SanDisk makes an excellent wearable MP3 player if you’re looking for something small that still has plenty of features.

Overview and Features:

• 1.35 x 2.17 x 0.65 inches (W x H x D), less than an ounce heavy
• MP3, WMA, WMA subscription services, and Audible file playback
• OLED screen
• Built-in FM tuner with 40 presets
• Built-in microphone for voice recording
• Rechargeable battery lasts about 15 hours
• Pricing: $39.99 (MSRP) for 1GB storage, $59.99 for 2GB, $79.99 for 4GB, $99.99 for 8GB. You can find them online for about $10 to $20 cheaper, though.

It’s good for…

…Windows users, people who use subscription music services, people who still listen to the radio, and people who want a small MP3 player with a screen. The Clip has been (and will continue to be) compared to the iPod Shuffle and while I don’t want to get into a whole Mac versus Windows thing here, I’m happy to report that the Clip is a perfectly capable digital audio player that can be clipped to your clothing like the Shuffle yet it has features the Shuffle doesn’t, such as an FM tuner, voice recording, subscription music compatibility, and a screen.

Setting up and using the Clip is easier than falling in love. You plug it into your computer’s USB port, it starts charging, and an explorer window pops up allowing you to drag and drop files onto it. It syncs with Windows Media Player as well.

Sound quality is excellent for such a small device (bring your own headphones) and battery life is long enough that it never seems to be an issue. I’ve used the Clip on and off for the past month or so and I think I’ve only recharged it once or twice. The little OLED screen is nice to have and navigating the UI works well enough, although the buttons on the player are a tad bit confusing at first. Nothing serious, though.

It’s not so good for…

…Mac users and/or people who don’t need any features beyond basic music playback. It’s about as simple as it can get without actually being an iPod Shuffle, but you still do have to navigate the menus to get your music playing and the Clip is a tiny bit larger than the Shuffle. Not a huge deal either way, but there you have it. On its own and without being compared to other MP3 players, though, I find the Clip to be an excellent choice for the money.

I wish it had…

…the headphone jack mounted on the top of the device instead of on the right-hand side, and a flip-out USB connection. The headphone jack isn’t a deal-breaker by any means. I just found it to be kind of awkward for some reason. I do wish the USB connection was built into the Clip, though. I think Apple had the right idea with the first-generation Shuffle’s built-in USB connection — it’d be cool if the Clip had a switchblade USB connection similar to the one found on the Flip video cameras.

Finally, I like the included voice recording feature but it would have been cool to extend it to recording the radio as well, kind of like the iRiver players. Not that I’d ever actually use that feature, but some people might. Just a thought.

Recommendation:

If you’re a Windows user looking for the best bang for your buck, the Clip is a hard player to pass up. It’s definitely a good choice for working out and for people who use subscription services. The voice recording and FM tuner are nice additions, too.

Product Page [SanDisk.com]

I like Sansa media players.  I always have.  They’re not quite as sexy as Apple iPods, and they’re not that much cheaper, really.  The reason I like the Sansa players is because they don’t require any special software on my computer — heck, the review model I received contained only the player itself and the USB cable: no software CD at all!  As a GNU/Linux user, I really enjoy being able to connect a Sansa player to my computer and have it immediately recognized as any other USB media.  I can simply drag-and-drop media files into the proper directory, and they’re ready to play.  And I can easily use a Sansa device in lieu of a USB memory stick, if necessary.  But enough about my personal preferences: let’s take a look at the Sansa View 16GB.

The Sansa View can play MP3, WMA, WAV, and DRM-free AAC audio files, as well as MP4, WMV and H.264 video.  It has an FM tuner, and the ability to record FM broadcasts.  You can also use it as a digital voice recorder, which is good for students and blackmailers.  The screen sports a 320×240 resolution: the same resolution as both the iPod Nano and the Zune, but at 2.4″ it’s bigger than both.  It also has a micro-SD slot to expand its storage capacity.

Pros

The View is a shade smaller than an iPod Touch, though not as slim, which makes it comfy enough to hold.  The scrollwheel is responsive, and easy to use.  Battery life is acceptable but not remarkable.  The user interface is simple: the main menu has only four items: music, videos, photos, and more.  Navigating through the UI is easy.  As an added bonus, it’s possible to delete files from the Sansa View without using a computer, which can be handy if you load up a song or video only to find out that you absolutely hate it and never want to hear it again (but see below for a big caveat).

The earphone jack is on the bottom of the unit, which didn’t make a lot of sense to me at first.  But then I stuck it in my shirt pocket and understood: when it’s in my pocket, I won’t be looking at the screen, so put the headphone jack closest to the control wheel, which you are likely to use (or try to) while it’s in your shirt pocket.  The included earbuds felt slightly larger than those bundled with iPods, but I found them to be perfectly comfortable.

Cons

The thing that really irks me about the Sansa View is that it uses a non-standard USB cable.  I long for the day when any device that connects to my computer by USB uses one of the standard USB cable connectors.  I’m tired of special, expensive proprietary cables cluttering up my workspace!

The Sansa View isn’t yet supported by RockBox firmware.  This may only be a bummer to folks who have a large collect of music in Ogg Vorbis format, though.

I tried to delete a single song and thought I ended up deleting all the songs from that artist.  Here’s how: after turning the unit on, before playing any music, I navigated to the music menu.  I selected “Unknown Artist” (because I didn’t set id3 tags on these songs), then “Unknown Album”, and then finally drilled down to a specific song.  I pressed the down button, which brings up the menu.  From the menu, I selected “Delete Song”.  I took note that it said “Song” in singular.  I pressed the middle button and was presented with a confirmation dialog that asked if i was sure I really wanted to delete the song (again, singular).  I selected Yes, and then I was returned to a screen that said, simply, “Empty”.  Navigating backwards, I found that the Sansa thought that the contents of  “Unknown Album” has been deleted.  Oddly, though, the next morning when I turned on the unit, I found that “Unknown Album” had been restored, and that only the song I had deleted was, in fact, deleted.  Very weird.  Moral of the story: you probably don’t want to delete files from the Sansa using the Sansa itself.

The Bottom Line

If you have an aversion to iTunes lock in, or don’t want to pay the Apple price premium, the Sansa View 16GB is a great digital audio and video player.

Thank you to Geeks.com for the review unit…

My good friend Peter Ha isn’t sold on the Sandisk SlotMusic hoopla (see his post here). I think it’ll work, though. You have to approach it from the mindset of the casual consumer for it to make sense. Think of the player like a Walkman or a Discman and MicroSD cards as blank tapes or CDs. Then remember that entire albums used to be sold on tapes and CDs and that for many people, there’s a certain comfort in being able to drop a piece of media into a hardware player and have it just work.

Here’s the basic idea, according to SanDisk:

“The Sansa slotMusic Player (MSRP $19.99) was made to play slotMusic card albums or a self-loaded microSD™ card full of music. The effortless player doesn’t require a PC, Internet or any time spent managing music. Consumers simply choose their slotMusic or music-filled microSD card, pop it into the device and will be enjoying their favorite tunes in seconds.”

The super-intelligent and highly tech-savvy readers of CrunchGear.com may well scoff at the notion of such a simplistic device, but remember that outside in that cold, cold world lurk dangerous creatures known as regular consumers who might appreciate not having to spend an entire morning in front of their 486DX/2 computers trying to figure out how to get the music they’re pretty sure they downloaded correctly onto the iPod they’re pretty sure they’ve got hooked up properly.

Maybe I’m not giving people enough credit but I recently went home to Minnesota to visit family and, after one particular afternoon spent people-watching at the Mall of America, I’m pretty sure there’s still a sizable market for a simple hardware device that animals with opposable thumbs can load up by pushing a small card into a slot.

For these people, the SlotMusic initiative could be a hit. The regular players will sell for $19.99 and there will also be artist-branded players that come with a full album on a 1GB MicroSD card for $34.99. The cards will contain all the songs, plus liner notes, artwork, and other fluff. Regular albums will be sold standalone for an MSRP of $14.99 – so basically, the CD is moving to MicroSD format if SanDisk has anything to say about it. The next step would be to get MicroSD slots in car stereos. Some stereos are already available with standard SD slots, though, so you could use an adapter.

At any rate, I think the SlotMusic thing is a good idea. I’ll probably buy one, too. And although I can’t see shelling out $15 for “albums” anymore, I bet you I’ll actually do just that at least once or twice in an airport somewhere. Think of those iPod vending machines, if you will. You can buy an iPod in an airport, but you can’t use it unless you hook it up to a computer first. Now put these SlotMusic players in a vending machine at $20, sell $15 albums next to them, and watch what happens. If you’re feeling really adventurous, set up a kiosk that allows people to make their own mixes on MicroSD cards. There’s a huge market here for audiobooks as well.

Bonus points to SanDisk for making the music on the pre-loaded MicroSD cards DRM-free. In a pinch, you could go into a store (or find a vending machine) that sells an album you forgot or lost, buy the card, and then dump it onto your computer. It’d be nice to see a regular-sized SD card version of this player, too, as I believe MicroSD cards only top out at 16GB and I seem to have ten-times more SD cards lying around.

So I agree to disagree with Peter and the rest of the pundits out there who think this isn’t a good idea. It’s not for everyone – and maybe definitely not for people who are already tech-savvy – but it’s best not to neglect the regular consumers who crave simplicity. There are far more of them than there are of us.

Buy.com has the SanDisk Sansa Shaker for the low, low price of $14.99, which includes free shipping. Being that it’s a SanDisk product, there’s an SD slot that you can use to expand upon the 1GB of storage that comes standard.

The Shaker has a built-in speaker, two headphone jacks, and song changing is handled simply by shaking the device. You can also change tracks and regulate the volume by twisting the white bands on the top and bottom of the device. The regular price for the Shaker is around $50, so this deal might not last all that long.

SanDisk Sansa Shaker 1GB [Buy.com] via FatWallet

Yes, indeed, SanDisk has a vested interest in people buying removable storage cards, seeing as how the company makes its money by selling memory. However, SanDisk’s Jan Hauer – director of product marketing – made an interesting prediction in London earlier today. Hauer predicted that, eventually, MP3 players won’t be outfitted with memory at all. They’ll all use removable storage cards. So will most other devices that play music, too. So you’d be able to take your memory card between your MP3 player, your computer, your car, and your home stereo, for instance.

Granted, you can already do that with many devices nowadays, but Hauer’s prediction is that you’ll be able to do that with all devices someday. Thanks to Moore’s Law, you’ll be able to keep doubling your storage for the same price every year without having to buy all new gadgets because they’d all just take the same removable media.

SanDisk also announced that its Sansa Clip and Fuze players would be getting Ogg Vorbis and FLAC file support via a soon-to-be-released firmware upgrade and that all SanDisk digital audio players from now on would contain FM radios.

via The Register

It’s giving away a free microSD card loaded up with 55 music tracks with the purchase of a new 8GB Sansa Fuze player.

The company’s expected to announce more content offerings in the future. It could work, too, since microSD slots can be found on all sorts of digital music players and cell phones. The 12GB cards can hold two full-length movies with room to spare.

The biggest issue will likely be price. Flash memory is getting cheaper but will it get to be exponentially cheaper than disc-based media? The big upside is that you can fit far more music on a multi-gigabyte flash card than you can on a CD.

However, that music’s likely to be compressed and 55 tracks on a flash card is bound to fetch a higher price tag than 12 songs on a CD. And that begs the ultimate question; do enough people still buy physical media to make this venture worthwhile?

The proliferation of microSD-compatible devices is what’ll make this interesting to watch. SanDisk doesn’t have to try to sell people on an entirely new and/or proprietary format but it will have to offer the content at a fair price to consumers who happen to have access to a microSD slot.

Sandisk Poised To Enter The Physical Music Market [Wired]

We first caught wind of the Fuze last week and now it’s official. The 4GB Fuze will come in red for now, we assume more colors will be available, and will retail for $100. The little PMP features a 1.9-inch screen, digital FM radio, voice recording and a microSD/SDHC slot. Battery life, according to Amazon, puts the Fuze at 24-hours for audio and 5-hours of video playback. $100 sounds like a good deal for a PMP that you can expand out thanks to the microSDHC slot, but a 1.9-inch screen isn’t going to get anyone all riled up. No confirmed ship date, but it’s said to ship within 1 to 3 months.

Amazon

So far, SanDisks PMPs have been pretty decent, I’ve had a Sansa for awhile and it’s a great alternative to the iPod. You contrarians should have love in your hearts for this device.

SanDisk Sansa Fuze in the Makings? [Anything but iPod]

Remember last year’s WrestleMania 23, when Vince McMahon lost a hair vs. hair match against Donald Trump? (There’s the clip to refresh your memory.) OK, so it was Bobby Lashley vs. Umaga, but you know what I mean. Take that scenario—a hair vs. hair match, very popular in Mexican lucha libre—and apply it to the sales of the Microsoft Zune 2 and the Sansa series of PMPs. Now this is exciting.

The spokeswoman for Sansa, Carm Lyman, has challenged her counterpart at Microsoft to a hair vs. hair match. If the Zune overtakes Sansa’s position as the number two (market share-wise) PMP company in the U.S. behind Apple this holiday season, she’ll shave her head. Bald. Bald bald. Calvo. (Well, calva in her case.) The Microsoft guy, Robbie Bach, has yet to accept her challenge.

If this were really pro wrestling, Bach’s honor would be on the line. Then the lights would turn off, Mr. Lyman would run in from the crowd and smash Bach in the face with a chair or other everyday object. Maybe a Zune 1, that giant monstrosity?

Carm from Sandisk ups ante; will shave her head too if Microsoft’s Zune makes it to #2 [Zdent]

The Shaker comes in pink or blue and has two twistable white rings for adjusting volume and skipping tracks. At one end, there’s an integrated speaker, and the other end pops off to reveal a mini-USB port, SD card slot, and battery compartment. There are two headphone jacks — a handy and fun plus — and a power/play/pause button on the sides. The Shaker lacks a screen, but that could be a plus for kids, since it’s one less thing to break.

At about 1.6 inches in diameter and 2.8 inches long, the Shaker is considerably bulkier than Apple’s second-gen iPod Shuffle and the Creative Zen Stone, but that may make it harder to lose. The Shuffle and Stone come in more colors, though the Shaker does come with a bunch of cute stickers. Another consideration is that the Shuffle is twice the price of the Shaker and lacks a speaker, though it has twice the memory capacity.

Accessories include a pair of earbuds that may be on the big side for young ‘uns, a triple-A battery, and a USB cable, plus a 512MB SD card that holds around 125 songs (128Kbps MP3s). The Shaker also comes preloaded with a double-handful of fun kids songs like “The Wheels On the Bus”.

Loading music on the Shaker is simple for Windows users: Just plug it into your PC’s USB port and transfer music files right in Windows — no music management software required. Just be prepared to wait for a bit if you’re transferring a lot of files, since the Shaker operates at USB 1.1 speeds.

The Shaker doesn’t support WMA files or subscription music, just MP3s and WAV files. It also lacks Mac support, though you can get an inexpensive card reader for your Mac and load music directly onto the SD card.

The controls are easier to use for kids’ smaller hands than for my own adult-size mitts, and nothing’s too terribly complex to figure out. Most kids will be able to whiz their way around it before their parents can say “Worldwide Developer Conference.”

To power the player on and off, hold the play/pause button for a few seconds until you hear a kooky sound effect. You skip tracks using one of the white rings, or you can hold the play/pause while giving the player a good shake to make it jump to a random song (accompanied by another sound effect).

Other sound effects play when you shake the player while it’s paused, when the battery is low or the SD card is removed during playback, and when there’s no music on the SD card. Unfortunately, there’s no battery indicator light, though you get roughly 15 hours of playback time per, depending on battery brand and type — not bad for this type of player. I like that you can use store-bought alkalines or rechargeables, so kids aren’t tethered to a computer when the player needs to be juiced up.

The sound quality on my review unit was problematic, which seems to be the norm with early runs from SanDisk. There’s distortion to the point where you can hear ghostly notes that aren’t in the original music. For example, when you hear a horn, it sounds like there are one or two other grungy-sounding horns in a parallel dimension playing along faintly. A SanDisk rep indicated that the company deliberately cut corners on the sound quality because of the target age, but this seems excessive to me.

Overall, the Shaker is cheap enough ($39.99) to be a fun stocking stuffer or gift, and that’s sure to be its main attraction. Is the Shaker exciting for adults, with its quirky features and sound effects? No. But judging from the way my two 8-year-old neighbors fought over it, this has potential to do OK with the kiddies.

MP3 players have had expansion slots for years, but until now they supported a max of only 2 extra gigabytes on top of the built-in memory. Well, according to a new spec, those fingernail-size microSD cards can now hit up to 32GB–enough to warrant rethinking the role of flash memory in an MP3 player. Luckily, cell phone and digicam makers provide plenty of inspiration!

Beating Moore’s Law
Moore’s Law states that every two years, microchips double in complexity (i.e., number of transistors) while maintaining minimum cost. Flash memory is nothing more than a microchip, and it’s not just following Moore’s law, it’s cruising at an even faster pace.

The SD Card Association’s new SDA 2.00 spec — which includes all Secure Digital formats, like miniSD and microSD — allows for cards up to 32GB, thanks to a change in file systems from FAT16 to FAT32. (Current devices aren’t compatible with the new spec, but they can be brought up to speed via a firmware upgrade.)

8GB microSD cards should be in stores by the end of this year (or early 2008) if Samsung holds to their recent announcement, and it’s a good bet someone’ll announce a 16GB microSD card by summer’s end for release next year.

You can already find 4GB players for $150 or less online, so by this time next year, 8GB players should be hitting or nearing the same price point. A 4GB SD card costs about $90 right now, so an 8GB card should be about $120 by the time it arrives in stores.

Confused? It means you’ll be able to get a player with a total of 16GB of flash for about $230 by next summer — not bad, especially considering you’ll be able to shuttle half that between your MP3 player, phone, GPS, HDTV, and (if automakers really get smart) dashboard. And lest I forget to mention it, you can move stuff on and off your computer via your laptop’s built-in card reader or a cheap external one.

SanDisk has long been ahead of the curve on expandable storage. According to Eric Bone, SanDisk’s director of audio/video product marketing, “The SanDisk e200, c200 and Connect families all (today) support up to 2GB microSD cards. We are working on firmware upgrades as we speak to get us to SDHC compliance, which clearly will give the products lots of headroom.”

Sharing Is Caring
Getting tons of music and videos onto a fingernail-size card is great, but you generally can’t transfer content between cards and music players — though there are a few exceptions like the Creative Zen Vision and some older Archos players. Everyone wants to do that wirelessly, but Wi-Fi really puts a hurtin’ on battery life… and will for the foreseeable future. Plus you’re not always near a hotspot, and Bluetooth is still way too slow for copying lots of music or video.

One of the reasons most manufacturers won’t let you transfer files to and from cards is to cover their asses limit possible company liabilities if the RIAA ever decides to crack down on hardware companies. But the industry’s stranglehold on music appears to be loosening, given recent developments on the DRM front, and I think hardware makers should help pave the way for a better sharing experience.

They can do this by looking to the digital camera market: Most digital cameras come with little if any internal flash memory. You get a starter card (nearly always uselessly small), you get a bundled card (usually at least 1GB), or you already have a suitable memory card. This strategy could easily be a huge hit in the MP3 player market within a year or two as flash prices continue to plummet and capacities increase.

DRM seems to be disappearing — at least for digital music — indicating a sea change in the attitudes of the recording industry towards sharing music. It’s time for MP3 player companies to start changing with the times and let us transfer content to and from removable media.

Then perhaps people will be more apt to share music one-on-one — especially among their own gadgets — rather than illegally distributing it to thousands of people at a time on a P2P network.

(The illustration above was created by Leah Perrotta, a Brooklyn-based artist and all-around lovely gal.)

Looks like Sansa’s Connect is essentially an OEM product out of Taiwan because Pandora is showing off a rebadged device to showcase its wireless streaming products. No real information on this thing, but TechCrunch got some screenshots and pictures. I wouldn’t expect Pandora to actually launch this device — it’s a proof of concept, kind of like the Music Gremlin eventually became. Pandora is quite popular and I suspect a device with wireless service would be just peachy… but this ain’t it.

Read the rest at TechCrunch…

Most frightening of all is the prospect of losing Pandora — one of the truly great things to come from the entire Interweb. I had the opportunity to interview Pandora founder Tim Westergren about a year ago, and the way he put it, the service is purely a labor of love born from his affection for expanding his own musical palette.

Right now. Pandora is under siege. In order to survive, it will likely have to evolve. And it will have to go mobile.

If you aren’t familiar with Pandora, you obviously haven’t stepped foot in an American office in the past year, where it has spread from headphone-bound cubicle worker to headphone-bound cubicle worker like crazy. The short of it: The Music Genome Project has mapped out a bounty of songs based on often-obscure musical traits (think “Groove Based Composition” or “East Coast Rap Influences”). You type in a song or artist you like, and the player takes over—creating an ad hoc radio station based on your choice filled with songs that share one or more trait with your beloved tune.

The brilliance in it is in the unexpected. The service not only exposes you to zillions of previously unheard of artists (a lot of the music comes from CDs that were simply mailed to the Project’s door), but it breaths new life into stale commercial music by stripping away layers of pretension. The fact is that many music fans don’t give entire chunks of artists a listening chance. This could be because they aren’t very well known or, as is often the case, because they are TOO well known.

Lets put it this way. I have never knowingly heard a Beyonce song. If you asked me if I liked Beyonce, I’d probably say “Nah,” and assume it was a safe bet that it wouldn’t do much for me. However, with Pandora, I could be rocking out to an obscure shoegaze track when Ms. Knowles suddenly comes on. Not being familiar with any of her songs, unless my Pandora window is filling my monitor at the moment, I’d have no way of knowing who she was. And, surprise, I could find myself actually enjoying it.

This is why Pandora is not just a boon to unknown artists looking for any exposure they can get, but it helps big-time commercial musicians reach entire sects of the music-loving public who have given up entirely on commercial music.

Still, they are threatening to put it under.

So what should Pandora do to survive? The answer is simple: Go mobile.

Sticking cell radios or Wi-Fi on mobile devices is becoming increasingly inexpensive and increasingly common. If there were a mobile way of accessing all of the features of Pandora, it would be far neater than either the walled garden of music content currently offered by cell phone providers, or even the hundreds of satellite radio stations available on portable devices such as XM’s Inno or Sirius’ Stiletto. Imagine being able to input a song or artist on-the-go, and having a personalized playlist, chock-full of surprises, pop up on the spot.

To make this a reality, there are two options: 1) launch a program for high-speed 3G mobile phones that will allow them to tap into Pandora, 2) Launch an MP3 player or dedicated music device with wireless capabilities designed specifically for Pandora.

The first one, while obviously a far easier proposition, does nothing to guarantee the longterm viability of the service. For one thing, it does nothing to address the financial realities of high royalty fees. In fact, it probably would be an awful idea, economically speaking. A large chunk of Pandora’s income comes from banner ads — a dicey proposition for mobile listeners. And while some enterprising mobile users have surely streamed Pandora to their smartphones, this is clearly not in the service’s intent (it actually blocks certain versions of Windows Mobile from picking it up.)

Something along the lines of a Pandora-branded music player would be a far better idea. Such a device would require them to partner up with a deep-pocketed manufacturer, giving them access to financial resources they currently don’t have. If they teamed up with SanDisk or Microsoft to produce a next-gen Sansa or Zune with built-in Pandora access, they could reap huge licensing fees of their own, and have more corporate muscle behind them than they could possibly dream of at the moment.

Pandora should be more than just an Internet radio site — it should be a brand.

Seth Porges writes on future technology and its role in personal electronics for his column, The Futurist. It appears every Thursday and an archive of past columns is available here.

To enter, all you have to do is make as many compelling comments as you can possibly muster. We’ll select the best two commenters from the entire week and they’ll each receive a Sansa Connect from SanDisk. Winners will be announced on Friday.

You absolutely must leave your email address in the commenter info field. No comments without valid email addresses will be considered. I emphasize this, because there is always a great comment that I’d like to reward, but it lacks an address.

Thanks to SanDisk for providing the Connects for the competition.

People have been clamoring for WiFi-enabled music players for a long time now. But current offerings from Archos, Microsoft, and SanDisk make it seem like they’re all just taking weak jabs at Apple, like when George McFly goes to deck Biff in Back To the Future and just lands a wimpy blow on his shoulder.

The big blunder is simple: keeping social WiFi (sharing music) and productivity WiFi (browsing, email) apart like two fighting kids. I may not be the sharpest spoon in the drawer, but even I can figure out that you can only score a truly big hit by incorporating both.

By leaving out half of the equation, companies are just throwing Apple a great big softball. Of course, whether Steve Jobs can manage to make the iPhone and its equally-important phoneless iPhone stripped-down sibling not suck is another story.

All Apple has to do is let the iPhone run Safari competently and make the device compatible with the Bonjour protocol so you can share music across devices and computers running iTunes. After all, what’s the difference if you’re accessing a nearby iTunes library with your laptop or with your music player?

Aside from the fact that Microsoft missed the boat on any kind of productivity uses for the Zune (ironic for a company that makes Internet Explorer and MS Office), over-restriction with sharing is what will ultimately kill the Zune.

Still, I admire Microsoft’s ballsy (though admittedly ill-fated) entry into the playground, and as I’ve written before, I think MS has a great shot at eventually getting it right with future Zune products.

But now Microsoft has a big hurdle to overcome: the reputation they’ve created with a crippled not-ready-for-prime-time product.

I recently spoke with Eric Bone, director of audio/video product marketing at SanDisk, about the company’s new Sansa Connect, which — like the Zune — focuses entirely on the sharing equation but with a twist that actually brings it close to being a real winner.

The Connect integrates with Yahoo in such a way that it gives you access to your Yahoo Messenger friends — but only for sending song recommendations. Why they couldn’t throw in some email or messaging functionality? (Don’t talk to me about screen size… I use my phone to check my Yahoo email account now, and I can still see straight. But I have to pay for it in airtime, which sucks.)

Bone talked about SanDisk’s gradual, cautious entry into the premium music player market in the last year or so, beginning with the Sansa e200 series. Fine — they bunted and got a triple out of it.

But SanDisk is still waiting for an intentional walk with the bases loaded, even though they’re down by a lot more than one run. It’s time to be Robert Redford in The Natural and try to smash the stadium lights.

Archos is a different story. They just don’t quite get what the US market wants — they’re based in France and seem to cater to a very small elite audience. The company doesn’t seem to realize the potential of its products, from the very first Archos Jukebox all the way to the 604 WiFi. Of course, it doesn’t help that Archos doesn’t have much in the way of marketing dollars either.

Face it: Release mediocre or half-baked products intentionally and that’s how people remember you, if they remember you at all. Take a mighty swing, and at least you get people’s attention, even if you strike out.

Don’t get me wrong — I’m not an Apple hater — but I was definitely a bigger fan when they were the underdog. Now there’s a different underdog (okay, everyone but Apple is the underdog), and I can’t help but root for them.

It really steams me when companies wuss out by not trying to knock one out of the park, especially when the winning formula is so crystal clear. Just remember, SanDisk et al: Steve Jobs can smell your fear.

Remember: In Back To the Future, Biff laughs off George’s McFly’s first failed punch, but while he’s laughing, George pulls back and knocks his smug, gloating ass out with one shot.

(Sorry, no illustration this week… Leah’s busy and I’ve been watching too many 80s movies and Mets games.)