What do you mean, iPods and Zunes (mostly iPods) own the personal music player market? Why, that totally overlooks SanDisk's MP3 Players, and their Amazon-leaked Sansa Fuze, which looks sorta like an Zunish iPod, only red. But it shows its true hipster colors by spelling "fuse" with a "z.' Hardcore!
It's basically an 4GB update of their 2GB Sansa Clip, with a bigger 1.9" screen to accommodate video playback. It supports MP3, WMA, and MPEG-4, and has both an FM tuner and voice recording features, which the market leaders don't. They also don't have the Fuze's microSDHC slot, but with 160GB drives they don't really need one. Whereas SanDisk tends to make microSDHC cards, so it's small wonder they'd be more willing to accommodate them.
But the big thing it has over the iPod or Zune? A 24-hour battery life for audio playback. Booyah! Beat that, you measly maybe-8-hour Apple pieces of junk! And it's red! Red is the color of anger!
Kidding aside, Amazon's taken down all the Fuze pages - whoops - until it gets an official release. But when it comes back, the Fuze, the Clip, all SanDisk MP3 players and even those lousy has-been iPods and Zunes are all eligible for a SquareTrade warranty. And seeing how the 4GB Fuze is only going to run about $100, it should make for a good budget MP3 player and a very reasonable 3-year warranty.
UPDATE: Well, it turns out the Fuze will come in three flavors and four colors, only one of which is the color of anger. The 4GB will be $100, but they're also posting a 2GB and a 6GB for $80 and $130, respectively, all available in Black, Pink, Blue, and Anger. They'll also support WAV, Audible, and JPEG files, and are due out sometime in April.
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