Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Emerging Tech
  3. Videos

SanDisk Opts for Video and Wireless Music

By
SanDisk Opts for Video and Wireless Music

SanDisk is looking to keep its momentum in going in the iPod-dominated media player market by introducing two new units designed to hit the iPod where it hurts—wireless capabilities and big-screen video playback.

The Sansa Connect is a Wi-Fi enabled portable digital music player which enables users to access and recommend music and photos from anywhere they can get wireless Internet access, along with tapping into music subscription ervices and streaming Internet radio. The Sansa Connect is built around mobile entertainment technology from Zing so users don’t have to use a PC to manage mobile music options.

Recommended Videos

“The Sansa Connect is a new music experience focused on convenience, instant gratification and social connections,” said SanDisk’s Eric Bone, in a statement. “It’s about accessing music of your choice wherever you are. If you’re listening to new songs from a music service and find ones you want to keep, you can bring them into your library and don’t have to wait until you get back to your PC. If you want to tell your friends about your discoveries, the Sansa Connect will also allow you to share music suggestions over the Web—anytime, anywhere—over an open wireless Internet network.”

The Sansa Connect will enable users to access or purchase content through “premium” Internet-based music services: SanDisk hasn’t said which services will be accessible, but given recent history and SanDisk’s recent alliance with RealNetworks, it’s pretty safe to say Rhapsody and PlaysForSure services are in and iTunes and the Zune Marketplace are out. The Sansa Connect also sports a microSD expansion slot, supports WMA and MP3 audio, a 2.2-inch LCD screen for managing music and displaying images, a built-in speaker for sharing music over the air rather than swapping gunky headphones back and forth, and a multipin connector supporting “made for Sansa” accessories. Initial Sansa Connect models will sport 4 GB of flash memory and have a suggested U.S. retail price of $249.99 when they hit retailers in March.

Meanwhile, Sansa is entering the mobile video player market with the Sansa View, a slim 8 GB portable video player with a 4-inch LCD display, an SD expansion slot, and AV outputs for putting your video and images up on bigger displays. The Sansa View can display images with resolutions up to 16 megapixels amd claims to offer “DVD-like” video quality. The Sansa View also has an integrated speaker (sure to consume battery life while you crank audio to all nearby—hey, life is about living loud, right?—but at least the Li-Polymer battery is user-replacable) and can combine digital music and photos into a slideshow or presentation display.

“SanDisk is excited to unveil its first portable media device with remarkably rich video capabilities,” said Le Tran, retail product marketing manager for the Sansa View, in a release. “The Sansa View is a sturdy, easy-to-use media player perfect for the road warrior or family looking for a video player that they all can enjoy.”

As well as being a video player, the View is a music player (compatible with Rhapsody, MTV’s Urge, and other PlaysForSure services), and is designed to work with Windows Media Player 10 and 11 (and Windows Vista) to sync content.

Expect the Sansa View to b priced around $299 when it hit U.S. retailers in the first quarter of 2007; the units will also be pre-loaded with movies, shorts, video clips, music and photos to show off their capabilities right out of the box.

Topics
Geoff Duncan
Geoff Duncan
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Geoff Duncan writes, programs, edits, plays music, and delights in making software misbehave. He's probably the only member…
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more
AI turned Breaking Bad into an anime — and it’s terrifying
Split image of Breaking Bad anime characters.

These days, it seems like there's nothing AI programs can't do. Thanks to advancements in artificial intelligence, deepfakes have done digital "face-offs" with Hollywood celebrities in films and TV shows, VFX artists can de-age actors almost instantly, and ChatGPT has learned how to write big-budget screenplays in the blink of an eye. Pretty soon, AI will probably decide who wins at the Oscars.

Within the past year, AI has also been used to generate beautiful works of art in seconds, creating a viral new trend and causing a boon for fan artists everywhere. TikTok user @cyborgism recently broke the internet by posting a clip featuring many AI-generated pictures of Breaking Bad. The theme here is that the characters are depicted as anime characters straight out of the 1980s, and the result is concerning to say the least. Depending on your viewpoint, Breaking Bad AI (my unofficial name for it) shows how technology can either threaten the integrity of original works of art or nurture artistic expression.
What if AI created Breaking Bad as a 1980s anime?
Playing over Metro Boomin's rap remix of the famous "I am the one who knocks" monologue, the video features images of the cast that range from shockingly realistic to full-on exaggerated. The clip currently has over 65,000 likes on TikTok alone, and many other users have shared their thoughts on the art. One user wrote, "Regardless of the repercussions on the entertainment industry, I can't wait for AI to be advanced enough to animate the whole show like this."

Read more
4 simple pieces of tech that helped me run my first marathon
Garmin Forerunner 955 Solar displaying pace information.

The fitness world is littered with opportunities to buy tech aimed at enhancing your physical performance. No matter your sport of choice or personal goals, there's a deep rabbit hole you can go down. It'll cost plenty of money, but the gains can be marginal -- and can honestly just be a distraction from what you should actually be focused on. Running is certainly susceptible to this.

A few months ago, I ran my first-ever marathon. It was an incredible accomplishment I had no idea I'd ever be able to reach, and it's now going to be the first of many I run in my lifetime. And despite my deep-rooted history in tech, and the endless opportunities for being baited into gearing myself up with every last product to help me get through the marathon, I went with a rather simple approach.

Read more