Over the weekend, Buy.com blabbed on SanDisk’s Sansa TakeTV, formerly previewed as USB TV. Now available, the TakeTV mobile video player will cost $100 for 4GB and $150 for 8GB. Buy.com also mentioned the Fanfare video service, now in beta. It just so happens we got to play around with both, shoot some galleries and formulate some early opinions:
It’s a funny little system, consisting of a video-capable USB flash drive, a dock with S-video, AV composite connectors and a power cord, and a remote that the flash drive can hug when not in use. You dock the USB drive to a Windows PC to load videos from the Fanfare service, but you can also dock it in any computer, Mac or PC, and load DivX, xVid and MPEG-4 videos onto it as a mass storage drive. galleryPost('SanDiskSansaTakeTVHandsOn', 8, 'SanDisk Sansa TakeTV Hands On');
The Sansa TakeTV appears to have been leaked by the good guys at buy.com. The device will allow the user to transport video files (DivX, xVid and MPEG-4) to their TVs, without the need for encoding/burning.
Finally, get the clip without losing your foreskin! The Sansa Clip will have tiny MP3 players running scared; the Shuffle and the Zen Stone better watch out, as the little Clip is set to show them a thing or two in miniscule music playback. Jump for the details.
Available in both 1GB and 2GB varieties the storage size is standard in the field, what is not standard is the inclusion of an FM radio, OLED screen, voice recorder and a more than reasonable 15 hour battery life. Playback formats supported will be MP3 and WMA only, but at $40 (1GB) and $60 (2GB), what are you complaining about? The small guy with big tricks is set for a September debut in those fun colours of black, red, blue and our favourite, pink. At this rate the Sansa Clip may even have a certain fatty running scared. That’s right, run faster you fat-ass, Sansa’s onto you! [Audio Junkies]
The Sansa Connect Wi-Fi-enabled player we saw earlier this year is already getting a $100 price drop down to the pretty awesome price of $149. If you remember, the 4GB player lets you share your music with strangers like the Zune does, but it also lets you download unlimited Yahoo music right from the device as well. This is a pretty darn good deal now. [News.com]
Good news to Sansa fans. Your favorite MP3 player line will support DivX video sometime in the near future, thanks to Sansa’s new licensing deal with DivX.
Being able to natively support DivX means you can go and grab TV shows/movies off BitTorrent and put them directly on your player without any time-consuming transcoding beforehand. – Jason Chen
Press Release [SanDisk]
Check out this ponderous video of an unboxing of the little $39 SanDisk Sansa Shaker, an MP3 player for kids that grabs its songs from an SD card. Shaped like a salt shaker, it looks like fun to hold down a button and shake it, making it change its tune. With its built-in speakers, it makes all kinds of fun sound effects, too. It also has two headphone jacks so two kids can listen to it at the same time.
After the jump, watch it being tested by the reviewer’s four-year-old son, who seems to really like it!
You know the Apocalypse is near when you read Walt’s buddy Katherine Boehret saying this in today’s The Mossberg Solution column:
I really liked the Sansa Connect. It forced me to look at my portable player as an evolving, untethered device that introduced me to lots of songs [...]My iPod suddenly seemed old-fashioned.
Sure, she doesn’t like the idea of subscriptions, the need for Wi-Fi for some functions or the fact that the Yahoo! Music Store only has two million songs versus five million in iTunes (come on Katie! I mean, how many versions of Elton John’s Goodbye England’s Rose do you want?) But overall, she seems to really dig the Sansa Connect for design, functionality, the neat Wi-Fi implementation and a good battery life. But maybe there is more than meets the eye in this review, right after the jump.
There’s a new kid on the MP3 block, and just like the Zune, it’s a player sporting Wi-Fi. The $250USD 4GB Sandisk Sansa Connect not only allows you to share your torrid musical preferences with dirty strangers on the subway, it also enables you to download unlimited Yahoo! music for $15 without the cords.
So what did the reviewers think? For this week’s Frankenreview, we hit up a TON of sources (ok…10) and grabbed their best quips. Hit the jump to read what Wired, Gadgetaholic, ComputerWorld, LAPTOP, I4U, Yahoo! Tech, Crunchgear, Late to the Party and PCMag had to say about this quasi-wireless MP3 player.
