SanDisk today (August 21, 2006) revealed that it will be releasing a new model of its Sansa digital music player with 8 gigabytes (about 2000 songs) of storage. It will directly compete with Apple’s popular Nano model, and is poised to do well because it has twice the storage space for roughly the same price.

SanDisk is well known as a primary maker of flash-memory cards, the type of memory that digital music players use, so with the release of the new player, the company is essentially cutting out the middleman. It seems that the savings will be passed along to the customer. Apple is the top dog in digital music and digital music players, so it will be interesting to see how Sansa’s new player fares. Itunes has become so popular that it is the industry standard, and the ipod has reached icon status, being featured in movies, TV shows, and every other medium available. Apple owns 80 percent of the market while Sansa has a mere 10.

The reason I took the time to write a few paragraphs about this topic is because it is going to be interesting to see how the market and public reacts to the first viable threat to the ipod’s dominance. SanDisk basically figured out that they cannot compete with Apple and the ipod in terms of “style” and “coolness”, so they decided to pack more memory and capability into their machine. Sansa spent the summer at the gym working out getting ready for the holiday season. Let’s see if ipod did the same, or just partied and hung out in grocery store parking lots. If the Sansa is user friendly, maybe it will do well. And you know what, it kind of looks like an ipod. (It’s primarily white with a wheel-like control pad.) Coincidence? I'm not so sure.