Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

"SanDisk Corporation today unveiled its next-generation of flash memory-based solid-state drives to support the evolving needs of designers, manufacturers and users in the exploding netbook market - SanDisk® pSSD™. The new SanDisk pSSD-P2 and SanDisk pSSD-S2 SSDs have capacity and performance for more full-featured netbooks which require a robust operating system. Designed as drop-in replacements for hard-disk drives, SanDisk’s new second generation module has a SATA interface to meet new netbook design requirements. The SATA interface offers a significant boost in performance rendering these SSDs faster than HDDs in critical aspects. Booting and launching applications takes just half the time of an HDD."

Good stuff. Some of the first generation netbook SSDs we geared for less than optimal performance, but it was a good way to ramp up production. As the netbook has become pretty mainstream, it is great to see some of the technology that goes along with it maturing.

Product Category: MP3/Video Player
Manufacturer: Sandisk
Where to Buy: Amazon [Affiliate]
Price: Starts at $129 USD for 8GB model
Specifications: Please refer to the Sandisk website

Pros:

• Excellent sound quality;
• Large, bright and crisp screen;
• Expandable memory;
• Works with subscription music services like Rhapsody;
• Great value.

Cons:

• Not the smallest player out there;
• Videos have a slight green cast;
• Supports only .jpg photo format.

Summary:
In the minds of many people, the name iPod is synonymous with MP3 player. But savvy consumers know that there are many excellent alternatives. One such alternative is the Sansa View by Sandisk. This flash player is designed to provide a good measure of the features of the hard drive-based iPod Classic at prices that compete with the iPod Nano. Can lots of features at an affordable price make up for the lack of the iconic iPod name? Read more...

Looks like a solid player - I sure wish the Sansa View was a wide-screen video player instead of the "bigger MP3 player with a bigger screen" approach they took.

"The device will come in 2GB, 4GB, and 8GB configurations, feature playback of MP3, WAV, Audible, WMA, MPEG-4, and JPEG files, and will be compatible with subscription services like Rhapsody To Go, Napster, and eMusic. As we mentioned in the previous post, the 4GB model will be available in black, red, pink, or blue, while the 2GB version only comes in black, and the 8GB is only available in silver. The models are priced at $79.99, $99.99, and $129.99, and will be available sometime in April."


Looks to be around the size of the Nano, but at a pretty steep discount to what the Nano goes for. Plus, it comes with some very un-Nano-like features such as microSD expandability and an FM tuner.

UPDATE: The Business Wire story we were linking to has now gone behind a login barrier (don't you just hate that?), so we're linking to the Fuze product page instead.

"The SanDisk FlashBack Adapter sounds like a device that comes in handy only when a catastrophe happens - it fits snugly into the ExpressCard slot of your notebook and will continue to back up and encrypt critial data onto an SD memory card automatically, ensuring that nothing gets lost in the unfortunate even where you accidentally spill some liquid all over your notebook. You will be able to choose the type of data that you want to undergo continuous and automatic backup."



Personally, I think this is a great idea but the execution is poor. If you have a home network it is pretty easy to do automated backups to another drive or location on your network. Since typical laptops only have one drive and are often not connected to your home network this provides a nice option. However, I need to question the use of the ExpressCard slot. Since most laptops have an SD slot already, why not just have the software write to that instead?