Watch out Apple, there’s a new MP3 player in town!

SanDisk, the company known for their flash memory cards, have devised a compact, good-looking music player that  comes bundled with a slotRadio card preloaded with 1,000 handpicked songs. Yep, I said 1,000. And not just random choices either but genre-themed playlists featuring artists from Billboard's charts, and professionally arranged into a variety of genre-themed playlists.

Slot music, in case you haven’t heard, is music on tenny tiny flash microSD  cards, the size of your thumbnail. Major record companies have embraced this new format, hoping to gain new buyers who don’t want to download or copy music from their computer.

The new slotRadio player is a solid die-cast aluminum player featuring a 1.5” OLED screen for viewing artist and song information, a FM radio and even an integrated, belt clip for hands-free listening,say, at the gym?  You can play both slotRadio and slotMusic cards on the player. The player costs $99, which includes a 1,000 song mixed-genre card, and additional cards are just $39.99.

Whether the new format will catch on is anyone’s guess but I for one love having it for when I want endless music (airport, gym) and haven’t downloaded anything new on my iPod.

http://www.slotradio.org/