Ahead of Its Time

I remember a few years back that there were plenty of mp3 players that utilized flash cards as their storage medium. The most common used the Secure Digital format, and built a simple and affordable player around them. Add in monochrome screen, and a set of earbuds, and we’re ready to rock and roll.

The only wrinkle in the plan was that in those days, flash cards were expensive, and the capacities were too small. With a 128 meg card, we could only fit around an album or two of music on the card. I think the companies expected us to buy up a pile of cards and keep swapping them to change music. Even with one of those silly flash card wallets, only the geekiest would want to walk around like that. No, Apple read the market, realized that a mini hard drive would be able to hold much more, and the iPod took over. Apple’s later flash players, the Shuffle, and the newer Nano, have the flash memory built in, and no slot for a flash card, which is really too bad.

One of the few players left that has any slot for a flash card is the SanDisk line. They use the more diminutive microSD card slot in all of their current players. However, the capacities are limited to 2 gigs currently, and the removable cards supplement the internal memory, but are not the only memory. (As an aside, the Sansa Connect is likely to support a new microSD high capacity format with a firmware upgrade, but the cards aren’t even on the market yet, and will likely be quite expensive).

Now that full size Secure Digital cards are so affordable, I’d love to see a dirt cheap player sold that uses the card as the only memory. Better yet, it should support the even larger capacity Secure Digital High Capacity (SDHC) cards that currently top out at 8 gigs, and are expected to grow even further in the not too distant future. Can we imagine a simple player with 8 gigs of flash memory for under a $100? And when the larger capacity card comes out, and drops to an affordable level, we can pop it right in the slot, and double our tunes.

Do I think we’ll see such a product soon? I doubt it. We’re in an Apple dominated media player world, and they’ve never made much that didn’t go out of date faster than the signature white got yellowed. If Microsoft was smart, such a player would make a nice addition to the Zune line, and fill their low end gap. The R&D would be minimal, they just need an interface, and decide on a battery, with my vote to a standard AA. If Microsoft doesn’t do it, then some company really should, maybe a flash memory manufacturer that at least would have a vested interest in selling the cards. In the meantime, this remains an idea ahead of its time.

--Jonas