Those of you who like the feeling of a tangible object that holds your music purchases might be interested in what SanDisk is planning with its microSD cards.
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.