Sandisk's boast: "We're number two!"

We haven't seen a company this excited about being number two in a market since Avis' old ads where the company boasted about being second place to Hertz. But when you're up against Apple and have spent almost nothing on marketing, being number two may be worth shouting about, which explains why SanDisk is sounding off about its second-place position in the US market for digital audio players. Of course, SanDisk is a very distant second place: the company sold a million audio players during the holiday period, compared to Apple's 14 million. Still, considering that the company's Sansa players have none of the iPod's cachet, and don't even get much respect from the Cowon/Creative/iRiver-loving anything-but-iPod crowd, number two seems like a good place to be. But they'd better not rest on those wilted laurels for long; no. 3 and 4 are just behind them, and this market has brought down bigger players than SanDisk -- including Rio, which was once ranked number one.

[Homer J @ Feb 9th 2006 6:34PM]

I am on my third Sandisk - I keep upgrading. Rhapsody integration is great - better than iPod in my opinion. You can easily move files via Windows Explorer, though subscription files need Rhapsody et al. - obviously. Menus are intuative.

OK so the screen is nothing to wirte home about compared to an iPod, but then again you spend alot less than an iPod - which is good if you use one for running, etc. etc.

[orwell84 @ Feb 9th 2006 6:44PM]

Sandisks are in number two for a reason.

They're cheap and i believe higher quality than the Shuffle. Sure the battery makes it a little large, but i'd rather be able to switch out a battery anytime i wan't rather than have to charge it.

[daniel @ Feb 9th 2006 6:53PM]

theyre hardly resting on their laurals look at the new mp3 players they have coming out they look better than an ipod nano

[kelly @ Feb 9th 2006 7:14PM]

#2 in the US market is a pretty low bar... creative, ugly, unattractive (but feature rich!) products that never even come close to matching their insane comments comparing them to the competition.

if cowon spent a dollar on advertising and US presence they would have it in the bag... their website is even quite marginal. a distributor arrangement would benefit them a great deal.

[Slaven @ Feb 9th 2006 7:15PM]

Keep in mind that SanDisk dwarfs Rio - they're a huge company, with hands in many pies. To them MP3 players are just an extension of their flash drive business, which has an existing world-wide distribution and a solid brand behind it. Which makes it kind of funny that with very little trying they beat Creative's fervent MP3 push.

[Danebert @ Feb 9th 2006 7:37PM]

#2

I work at an Office Depot, and we carry the Sandisk Sansa players - and I've NEVER seen so many returns. They tend to break after maybe a days worth of regular use - they refuse to turn on at all. I can't say I'm surprised - they feel so cheap - the buttons suck, and the plastic is thin. I really want to know what makes you say they're higher quality than the Shuffle - if you happen to have a well made one, kudos, for you are the lucky one. In my experience, these cheap mp3 players aren't worth the purchase because of the high frequency of breakage (we also sell the Creative Nano, which I normally recommend when people come in looking for the Sansa because of its ridiculously low price).

[Ward Reed @ Feb 9th 2006 7:55PM]

I bought two of these for my mother and sister for Christmas gifts. They were both pleased as punch with them and they are still working well (#6 notwithstanding).
I was very surprised at the menu system of the unit. Very well done and intuitive, something I did not expect in something so inexpensive.
Judging from the Engadget reporting at CES, Sandisk is going to be coming out with some better units. They may well hold #2 for the time being if they continue to make inexpensive players for the lower end. So what if they are ugly, so am I. I buy crap like this for function only.

[3rdsun @ Feb 9th 2006 8:35PM]

I never heard someone so happy to be shit. lol we are #2

[Jrat @ Feb 9th 2006 8:59PM]

I have the model pictured and its been great. Battery life is excellent, as well as the sound quality. Never had to install anything to get it to work and the FM radio pulls in signals strong. Definitly MUCH better then a shuffle - which is the original gift I returned to Bestbuy to get this one.

[Robert Preseau @ Feb 9th 2006 8:59PM]

That's what I call a bad brag.

PS: Has anyone found my ipod yet? It's been MIA for almost 2 months now. :-(

[Pop @ Feb 9th 2006 9:26PM]

I was originally planning on getting a usb flash drive, but the sandisk players were so cheap during the holiday sales that it was like a $10 addon for mp3 support.

I don't regret getting one at all. I've been using it pretty much daily on my commute and it's been rock solid. I consider the use of AAA batteries a plus even if it makes the player a bit bulker because I already have a couple rechargeables and can swap at any time.

As for the comparison to the shuffle, it was never on my radar because of the missing screen alone.

[sracer @ Feb 9th 2006 9:37PM]

I bought the 512MB Sansa pictured on Black Friday (Best Buy had a door-buster price of $39).

I am quite impressed with the Sansa. Sure the shape is a bit odd, but it sounds great, the menu system is VERY intuitive, downloading songs is straightforward, and battery life on the single AAA is stellar.

I wonder what impact Black Friday sales had in getting Sandisk into the #2 spot. The local Best Buy had over 100 of them, and they were all gone within an hour.

[Sean @ Feb 9th 2006 9:47PM]

Sandisk players have a feature that iPods should have.

It mounts as a regular drive (and you just drag over your music), when you unmount it, firmware on the player indexes the files you added. So you get the benefits of indexed music, but you don't need to use any special software.

I picked up my sandisk 1gig for $70 at best buy.. it's been a nice little player.

[hwood @ Feb 9th 2006 10:07PM]

ipods can be mounted as drives

[Spencer Moy @ Feb 9th 2006 10:54PM]

I like my sandisk too. My reasons for not getting the ipod is because cheap, has a screen, can change batteries on the go and fm. I guess I'm also waiting out for an ipod with the right specs and affordable. One bad thing I notice about the sandisk is when I go jogging, it turns off. I assume since it's flash, it shouldn't skip but I don't know why else would it turn off.

[Josh @ Feb 9th 2006 11:39PM]

Let's not forget Snapple's old "We're number two!" commercials.

#14, Being one of the 2% of the population without an iPod, I didn't know about the indexing thing. The Zen Micro's firmware indexes its stuff upon disconnect, too, so I guess I've taken that for granted.

[luke @ Feb 9th 2006 11:43PM]

I have a sandisk sansa player, and it has very good features and very bad featurs. Good: relatively cheap, mounts as a regular drive, SD expansion slot. Bad: sound quality not great, maximum volume nowhere near loud enough, defaults to medium volume every time i turn it on (way too quiet), and when you play an album it neither sorts alphabetically (i have my album files in alphabetical order by track number) or by the track number in the id3 tag. I have no idea how it sorts the files, it seems random to me.

overall, i find that the bad outweigh the good and I find myself wanting to spend the extra money for an ipod.

[Ellie @ Feb 10th 2006 12:33AM]

I worked at Circuit City and sold nothing but mp3 players for nov/dec.

I got three groups of people.

1. iPod people
2. Cheap people
3. People too stupid to know to get an ipod or go cheap.

The cheapest (and slightly decent) players are the Sandisk (death to those that say scandisk). Also, they are mainly the players that go on the hard core sales and everything.

[mcknight @ Feb 10th 2006 12:59AM]

I'm still waiting for this darkhorse underdog ipod killer player:

1.) plain win/mac folder/file access
2.) AA or AAA batteries
3.) SD card (no onboard memory required)
4.) Good sound quality (volume and S/N ratio)
5.) built-in radio (at least FM)
6.) no retarded interface or functional quirks

Sandisk is just about as close as you can get for now...or is there another?

[MinceyFresh @ Feb 10th 2006 1:31AM]

to #18:
Haha! I feel your pain... I was a "Product Specialist" at the City as well (and the 2005 holiday season was enough for me to drive me up the wall and quit). I'm sure you got just as many people asking "So what's the difference between an iPod and an mp3 player?"
And yes, all those people who put a letter C in Sandisk pissed me off, too...

Anyway, something strange I noticed is that the Sansa plays songs in its albums in alphabetical order rather than numerical order IF I tag the track numbers in iTunes as
"1 of 12,"
"2 of "12,"
etc. as opposed to just "1," "2," "3..." etc.

Anyway, I'm really excited to see Sandisk's newer players that are coming out next month. They seem to have actual thought put into the design. ;)

[daniel @ Feb 10th 2006 2:24AM]

amd isnt second anymore, and if you count all linux distrubutions as a whole apple is actually third place as operating systems go

[Revrant @ Feb 10th 2006 2:57AM]

AMD certainly whallops Intel in generally every category out there while running cooler, the gaming crowd chooses them for a reason. Though Intel is better with....Matrices of some sort? Someone told me that, explained a specific benchmark which had Intel in the lead - But I digress, more power to Sandisk, these companies just need to market their products, none of them get any real TV time, for the most part they've superceeded the iPod in all aspects, they just aren't hip, thus people pick on their flaws more than they do the iPod.

Let's not forget, ol'Fozy is #2, next thing we know, we've got a decked out, heavily updated, and tabbed IE7, it's just what Apple needs, a good kick to the rear, get in motion, make the iPod better instead of tweaking it.

[Mike D. @ Feb 10th 2006 3:06AM]

Another Circuit City employee checking in to say that we sell a TON of these hunks of garbage. A ton of them also get returned. They look like they were designed for 5 year olds. They are the cheapest players we sell, and in my area, that's all people care about. People either want the cheapest thing we have, or the most expensive. Not too many people thinking rationally and picking up a Samsung, iRiver or Creative player. It's all this junk and the iPods.

Also, WHY DO so many people call this company "Scan Disk"? It drives me up a wall!

[newsmanucd @ Feb 10th 2006 3:16AM]

i have a 30gb video ipod and i love it but i got my dad the sandisk m260 (the 4gb version) for xmas. its perfect if all you need is something with a lot of storage that will play music. sure there's no "ooh" factor to it like with ipods, but there were four reasons why i went with the sandisk over the ipod:

1. my dad travels a lot for work so and he's not always near a computer (or he's near a computer full of stuff that could get him charged with spying if he ever hooked up data storage device to it). being able to swap batteries whenever he needs was huge.
2. its not full of features he's never going to use. he's never going to put photos on it or look up album art so why pay extra for it.
3. everything he needs came in the pack. no spending extra money on a case, good headphones or an fm receiver. the only thing we had to buy was a usb 2.0 card for his computer, a whopping $10 at fry's
4. its not delicate. this thing won't scratch or ding unlike the nano which is more akin to warm butter.

the only thing i can't figure out is how to get a playlist on the damn thing. the manual is probably the most useless document i've ever read and is no help. the head of sandisk is an indian, maybe i should call him up and tell him to help a brutha out.

[crike @ Feb 10th 2006 5:14AM]

They are a good brand, quality devices, good prices.

Thumbs up.

[Person too stupid to get an iPod or go cheap @ Feb 10th 2006 7:29AM]

"I worked at Circuit City and sold nothing but mp3 players for nov/dec.

I got three groups of people.

1. iPod people
2. Cheap people
3. People too stupid to know to get an ipod or go cheap."

People wonder why I dont shop at Brick and Mortar stores.

[JinKazama @ Feb 10th 2006 8:13AM]

SanDisk is a perfect example of how simply making a good product can still succeed in today's marketing driven economy.

[Goodman @ Feb 10th 2006 9:25AM]

Add me to the folks who bought a couple of the pictured player at the Best Buy Black Friday sale. I was quite impressed with them. Easy to use and solid Plays For Sure support. The FM radio turned out to be neat on weekends (when radio isn't wall to wall ads). Nice interface. I like that one can swap out the battery. My only quibbles were that 1) you have to synch the player to delete tracks and 2) the black and white screen (like ALL black and white screens) isn't as easy to read sometimes as I would like. But the C100 series adds a color screen, which remedies complaint number #2 (for all I know they'll remedy complaint #1 as well). And the upcoming e200 series looks cool too. (See http://www.sandisk.com/Corporate/PressRoom/PressReleases/PressRelease.aspx?ID=3193 )

[Bryan @ Feb 10th 2006 9:31AM]

Picked up one of the Sansa m230 models up for my girlfriend a couple months ago. After some creative price matching and rebates, it came to something like $10.

She's not the most tech-savvy person, but she's had no trouble using it, including transferring music from the computer. I consider that worth the price of purchase alone!

So it may not be the best out there, but it works just great for her.

[Atul Chitnis @ Feb 10th 2006 10:58AM]

I bought one of the pictured models for Christmas for my daughter. It died within a week when a file didnt quite fit on it, and the copy process got aborted. After that, it would just keep rebooting - there was no button to reset the thing to factory defaults and clear all memory. Returned it to BB, who took it back without asking any questions - they clearly had seen plenty of these before.

[Nick @ Feb 10th 2006 12:10PM]

#21 & #22:
My creative MP3 player has better sound quality and costs less and has more features than my iPod. If I were to say that that makes it #1, I would get flamed.

AMD is not number one in market share, which is what this whole article is about. As you've proven by your pointless, uneducated comments, we see who AMD is geared towards.

[Mark @ Feb 10th 2006 2:36PM]

Does anyone make an MP3 player other than Apple?

[Nate MC @ Feb 10th 2006 4:25PM]

I work for Major Office Supply Store.

So I am really getting a kick out of most of these replies.

Some of you guys are very good at making it sound like you know what you are talking about.

But trust me.... You don't.

I think you just want to make yourself sound smart, when in reality you dont know what you are talking about.

This is how bad info gets passed around.

If you dont know about the topic....Dont make yourself sound like you do.

Cuz some Farkers belive anything they hear.

/sorry I had to.

[Gadget Freak @ Feb 10th 2006 4:32PM]

Unlike many other idiots, I simply don't much care to own the stupid iPod in any color from the arrogant fruity company.

[hGlenn @ Feb 16th 2006 9:57AM]

Picked up the Sandisk M240 (1GB) last weekend to use on my commute on the LIRR. SO far so good: easy to add tracks, good FM tuner, easy to read display screen. Is there room for some tweaks to make this little device even better: sure there is. But the same can be said for many of the players on the market. All in all this is a very good player for the price.

[Ronald @ Apr 4th 2006 3:32PM]

I bought a Creative MP3 about a year ago. I used it for a week, and threw it in a drawer. I haven't seen it since. I log onto XM radio online instead.

[Waldoski @ Jul 25th 2006 7:05PM]

Sandisk makes flash memory which is where most of the cost is in these MP3 players so they have a lot of room to cut prices.

According to their CEO they intend on selling their line at prices ranging from $50 to $150 and they also mentioned including video in these lower priced models.

Pretty good deal and shows how much these things are being marked up and how far they will come down in price over the next 2 years because Toshiba, Samsung also manufacture memory and are likely to lower prices on their players as well.