Another Killah

So there's a new portable music player hitting the market soon. SanDisk claims to have a doozy - an 8GB model that holds twice the amount of the iPod nano for nearly the same price.

PLEASE don't call this an iPod killah. Every new digital music player that comes out is supposedly the next gadget that will overtake Apple's market position. Microsoft's Zune was the most recent gadget to carry that tag (at least by industry prognosticators, not necessarily by Microsoft).

The new Sansa e280 will come with 8GB of flash, a small color screen and a microSD expansion slot to add as much as 2GB of additional storage. I kind of like that feature as it is sometimes quicker to add songs by dragging them onto the storage card rather than synchronizing the player with the computer.

The new player will retail at just under $250, SanDisk said. By comparison, a new 4-gigabyte Nano is priced at about $249. One of the more expensive parts of a player is flash memory. Since SanDisk is the world's top supplier of flash memory data storage cards they can apparently pass some savings to the customer.

It seems like a good deal but I'll hold my official ruling until I see if its features are as easy to use as an iPod. If so, I just might proclaim this to be a killah product.