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

SanDisk Wi-Fi Player Hooks Up with Yahoo

By
SanDisk Wi-Fi Player Hooks Up with Yahoo

SanDisk announced today it has formed a partnership with Yahoo to provide music, media, and messaging services for its new Sansa Connect Wi-Fi enabled flash-based media player.

"The Sansa Connect is a new breed of music player," said SanDisks’ Daniel Schreiber, senior VP and general manager for SanDisk’s Audio Video Business Unit, in a statement. "It untethers consumers from their computers, and allows them to get new music and share their recommendations anytime, anywhere—over an open wireless Internet network."

Recommended Videos

The announcement is timed to coincide with the retail availability of the Sansa Connect in the United States; announced last January the Sansa Connect combines the features of a flash-based media player (with microSD slot) with Wi-Fi capabilities which (now) tap into several online Yahoo features and services. Users with a Yahoo ID and access to an open Wi-Fi connection (WAP/WEP encryption is supported) users will be able to tap into Yahoo’s Launchcast Internet radio, Flickr photo sets, and see what music nearby Sansa Connect owners and Yahoo Messenger friends are playing. In addition, Sansa Connect owners with Yahoo Music Unlimited To Go subscriptions will be able to download music, as well as listen to or download tracks their friends are listening to, or which they’ve recommended.

The Sansa Connect sports 4 GB of flash memory, that microSD slot for additional music and photo storage, and offers an internal speaker along with a 2.2-inch LCD display. It supports MP3 and WMA encoded music, and works with all PlaysForSure music subscription services. The Sansa Connect is priced at $249.99; it should be available in Canada later this year.

Terms of the Yahoo deal were not disclosed. SanDisk bills itself as the number two seller of portable music players in the United States, trailing only Apple’s iPod. (And what a trail that is: the iPod commands about 70 percent of the portable player market and just sold its 100 millionth unit.) The Wi-Fi enabled Sansa Connect may give Sansa a leg up in the portable media space, but the company (which was primarily known as a maker of flash and portable memory before getting into consumer media devices) faces competition from rivals like Sony and Samsung, and shrinking margins in the flash memory market as mobile phones and digital cameras proliferate. The new Wi-Fi and music streaming features might appeal to folks considering a Zune music player—particularly if they’re already users of Yahoo’s music services.

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…
This AI cloned my voice using just three minutes of audio
acapela group voice cloning ad

There's a scene in Mission Impossible 3 that you might recall. In it, our hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) tackles the movie's villain, holds him at gunpoint, and forces him to read a bizarre series of sentences aloud.

"The pleasure of Busby's company is what I most enjoy," he reluctantly reads. "He put a tack on Miss Yancy's chair, and she called him a horrible boy. At the end of the month, he was flinging two kittens across the width of the room ..."

Read more
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
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