First Zune, now Zing! The second big Z to challenge iPod's supremacy of the music player market is a tech startup whose technology will mount a challenge to Apple's rosy-fingered dawn. To be offered as the Sansa Connect, Zing's competitor was released in cohoots with SanDisk on Friday.
A 4GB flash-based player with an SD memory card slot, the WiFi-enabled player will allow listeners to buy and stream music directly from the device (from Yahoo's music store, of course). Apparently, embedding the music store in the player wasn't the easiest of tasks to accomplish, with Zing's Tim Bucher, a former Apple exec, talking of the difficulties in making the experience "seamless enough where you don't have to be an IT professional."
Though touted as competition for the iPod, it's really more of a Zune-killer. Microsoft's withered-on-the-vine player's biggest hook was its WiFi song-sharing features, now slam-dunked by something that puts WiFI to more extensive use.
If you're faintly revolted by the deliberate feature-limiting of even the simplest and most straightfoward tech toys, at least enjoy the desperate un-feature-limiting that follows when competitors emerge.
The Sansa Connect costs $250.
Sansa Connect [Ars]
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