SanDisk Rocks New Audio and Video Players

One of my picks for most interesting gadget at CES 2007 is definitely the just-announced SanDisk Sansa Connect, the latest in SanDisk's highly regarded line of flash-based MP3 players.

The Sansa Connect takes the ideas that the Microsoft Zune started toying with and actually turns them into something you might conceivably want to use in real life. First, it's wireless and not some half-baked Wi-Fi like the Zune. The main benefit: The Connect can hook into an Internet music service (which one hasn't been announced) and download songs from it in real time, without a PC. You only need to be near a regular Wi-Fi hotspot. Want to share music? Well, having the Internet music subscription gets around all the DRM issues. You can share music picks with any other friend who has a Connect player through the Connect's sophisticated social networking system. But rather than beam a song directly to another player, the other player just downloads it from online. Makes a lot of sense. The device also gets Internet radio (live). A 4GB player will run $250.

Other new gear was introduced, including the Sansa View, which SanDisk says is the lightest widescreen video player on the market. It's an 8GB, flash-based player with broad support for video formats and an SD card slot for your expansion needs. The video looks good and, at $300, it's much cheaper than some of the hard-drive based solutions out there.

Finally, for the ultra-budget consumer, the $60 Sansa Express is basically a 1GB player the size of a roll of Life Savers. It has an OLED display and a MicroSD card slot, giving you another 2GB of expansion capability. But really, that ultra-cheap price tag is what caught my eye.