The iPod and Zune had better watch out, there is a new kid on the block doing a lot of things better than they are. The SanDisk Sansa Connect was announced at CES this year and will be available for purchase soon. The Sandisk Sansa Connect features a bright and crisp 2.2” display, 4GB of storage and plays MP3, WMA and Protected WMA files. What makes this different from the Zune and the iPod is its ability to download music wireless from the Yahoo! Music store and allows you to listen to streaming music over WiFi. You can listen to tracks on Yahoo! Music for free but if you wan to browse their entire selection and download tracks you must purchase a subscription which will run you $12 per month or $144 per year, it’s too bad they don’t offer a discount on yearly subscriptions.
I would not consider the Connect if you do not wish to get into the whole Yahoo! Subscription model, though if you want to listen to streaming audio, that’s free. But almost any PDA can do that with ANY streaming station.
In addition to the 4GB of storage it has a MicroSD slot for memory expansion. Between your own music collections, streaming audio and wireless purchasing abilities you may well need it.
It’s not without its faults however, Jasmine France of Cnet and Tim Gideon of PC Magazine via Fox News have done in-depth reviews of the device and it gets good to excellent recommendations from both but it still has a few flaws that need to be dealt with.
The Connect can’t talk to your computer wirelessly, it would be nice if it could but no MP3 player can so I’m not going to fault it for offering a feature that no one else does and besides wireless transfer speeds are slower anyway.
Some wireless networks are not recognized, especially open free access networks; it seemed to fewer problems with secured networks which is a bit odd. Continuously using the WiFi radio will seriously reduce battery life which is not unexpected, WiFi radios are one of the worst power drains next to displays.
But, everyone agrees that is has a “nice design” and with minor issues aside it could become a product of greatness provided some of them are fixed.
For me personally the failing of every Sandisk model (and others) is the lack of support for unprotected AAC files. Sandisk is number two behind Apple and one would think if they are trying to tempt current iPod owners over to their side that they would support unprotected AAC files but almost no one does except for Sony.
In my opinion, all other manufacturers need to support unprotected AAC files because I don’t want to convert a library of over 1400 AAC files (those are just the AAC files) to MP3 which would just take far too long and I’m probably never going to do it.
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