SanDisk Baits Apple And Woos Rockbox

An anonymous reader writes "CNET reports that SanDisk is courting open source developers to port Rockbox to its popular MP3 players. SanDisk is currently the world's second most popular MP3 player manufacturer after Apple. Rockbox is an open source OS for most major MP3 players. The article also talks about SanDisk's subversive new anti-iPod advertising campaign which calls iPod owners 'iChimps' and uses a 'street graffiti style' to create the illusion of a 'counter-culture uprising against the iPod'. The writer says, 'SanDisk is the first company to market its player as an ideological rather than technological alternative to the iPod. To do so is to fight Apple on their own terms.'"

More Info:

[shrapnull]

I "accidentally" stumbled onto the iDon't [idont.com] website the other day when I was researching Ogg alternatives to iPod.

It's not so much that the iPod is without it's flaws, but for them to masquerade as a "revolution" counter-culture and have me find out that it's a sponsored astroturf really pissed me off. Not only that but the link to the SanDisk player on the site, also went to a SanDisk-sponsored page Anything But iPod [anythingbutipod.com].

I can judge for myself based on the qualities and features of a player for myself, but blogs are getting more and more worthless every day since big media will simply continue to masquerade with a false list of "satisfied customers" for everyone to see. A previous employer of mine has actually added astroturfers to their PR team that do nothing but spam forums with their excellent experience with the product they secretly happen to sell.

sigh...

Sad individual who needs to get with the program

[kindbud]

Their propaganda site www.idont.com used to have a message when you logged in with Javascript disabled that said "You're a sad individual who needs to get with the program." Really. This message was surrounded by a bunch of slogans like "Think For Yourself" and "Resist Conformity."

They've changed it to say "This site requires Flash and a sense of humor" but I thought the earlier message was a lot more funny.

On Apple's Terms

[bahwi]

Apple's terms haven't been popularity, "counter-culture" or anything else. Yes, that's helped, a lot, but the biggest thing about it is it is easy. It's a music player. Nothing more. It's not a strange new fangled USB device that connects to the computer in some weird way, and you have to load weird software and jump through hoops to get it to work. Apple integrated everything it could, made it as simple as your CD player, and then sold it.

It's cool for geeks to have an iPod cuz they're expensive, but for most of the world, iPods work. I've known people who have bought most others and spent days figuring it out. With an iPod you go home, install iTunes, rip a CD, plug it in(or sit it in the dock) and that's it. You don't have to click through 15 menus to copy music over, you just connect it with the computer and it does the rest for you.

Not trying to sound like an Apple Fanboy here, but it looks like SanDisk is only targeting geeks with this. The counter culture thing is cool, but when you tell your friends you're gonna go get a sandisk whatever it's called, they'll say "Oh, that's really hard to use. I just sold mine on ebay and got an ipod" what's all that counter culture crap gonna do for you?

I don't say this to say "Apple Forever!" I'm saying that everyone else needs to make it simple. I'm tired of calls from friends and relatives who got an MP3 player and can't get it to work, the others I tell to get an ipod and poof, no trouble. Just cuz you have an MP3 player doesn't mean you know what an MP3 is, what a computer is, or how or why the CPU is not the big black box that everything plugs into with the Dell logo.

Definitely not taking them through price...

[guice]

0.o

Sansa(TM) e270 MP3 Player 6GB Price: $279.99
Sansa(TM) e260 MP3 Player 4GB Price: $229.99
Sansa(TM) e250 MP3 Player 2GB Price: $179.99

A bit high there. My music collection won't even fit on their highest end product. Not to mention any videos you might want to load. They do realize it takes a little bit more than direct attacks against "the fad" to gain customers over.

Re:Clever Campaign.

[OmegaBlac]

Apple got its dominate position by creating a effective and user freindly UI to a useful and stylish bit of hardware.

I think we are at a point where it seems like everyone has an iPod and nobody wants to feel left out so they buy one to be apart of the crowd. Two of my friends recently purchased iPods specifically because they saw others on campus using them--nothing to do with UI and how stylish the hardware is. IMO, most people buying iPods these days are buying it to feel a belonging to a "movement"/culture or because it is some kind of new fad going on. Sheep indeed...

Re:iZZZZZZZ

[Atzanteol]

And nothing says "street cred" like a modern Western corporation. Hey, I be down wit dat, um, dogg... or word, or whatever. Shizzle-something.

I think you give suburban middle-class kids with lots of 'guilt money [investinkids.ca]' *far* too much credit. Take a trip to a local high school - you'll see more walking billboards than at a NASCAR event...

Corporations have figured out teens for some time [pbs.org] now.

SanDisk not the first to approach Rockbox

[ZipR]

Neuros has chatted with the Rockbox developers too, last fall: http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/NonArch os#Upcoming_Models [rockbox.org]

Re:Variety of Models can be Confusing

[penguinstorm]

Indeed. Meaningless distinctions between products in the end create confusion more than anything else.

I was just shopping for a Thinkpad for work - figured an R43 would be good. Turns out there's a bunch of R43's, with some silly distinction on the end. Different drives, different screens etc.

Apple's computer marketing has been very succesful for the same reason it's iPod marketing has been. You buy an iPod that holds 4,000 songs. Not an jPod II Model 3-8 with the optional FM transmitter.

I agree.... advertising had little to do with it.

[King_TJ]

I remember skipping the first 2 generations of iPods as completely irrelevant. (I already had a nice in-car MP3 playing stereo system, as well as a nice MP3 music collection on my shared LAN at home. I couldn't really grasp why I'd want to spend hundreds on the ability to take yet another copy of those same files around with me in my pocket - especially since most of my music listening happened at home or in the car.)

Then, a friend of mine actually invited me to play around with his new 3rd. gen. iPod, hands-on. I was immediately fascinated. The scroll wheel made it so easy to navigate the menus, and everything was on an easy-to-read display screen. It even had some basic PDA type functionality (contacts and calendar synching), making it more justifiable to carry around than I anticipated. Then I realized one could even boot a Mac from one of these things and use it for emergency recovery in case of a drive crash. A quick look at the available accessories for it made me realize another key point; the iPod was the industry standard! Anything you could imagine wanting to add on to a portable player was available in an iPod friendly version. They even had clock radios with iPod docks on top of them.

Then it struck me. If you can't find some use for an iPod, you're just not trying hard enough. That's the beauty in these things. Photographers can take one around as a mass storage "vault" for their digital photos, instead of juggling a handful of memory sticks or cards. In the current form, you can watch podcasts with training videos for software products like Photoshop, or just the latest comedy skit while you're on the bus or train. It can totally replace music CDs (or even CDRs full of MP3 files) in your car. Take it camping with external speakers... 21st. Century Boom-Box! Battery life is excellent and they "just work", as Apple always promises of their products.

Re:Clever Campaign.

[Ptur]

The contact between SanDisk and Rockbox is real, not a rumour.

Attention hardware manufacturers

[mogrify]

Hardware manufacturers! I'll make this easy for you. Here's what I want:

• At least 60GB of capacity, but more if I can get it
• At least 10 hours of battery life, but more if I can get it
• A built-in FM transmitter
• Filesystem-based library (i.e. no database rebuilds necessary)
• The ability to build custom playlists on the fly
• The ability to play whatever I want, in whatever format I want, but especially Ogg, FLAC, and Speex
• Open-source firmware

I don't care about video. I mean seriously, it's a 2.5 inch screen. And I want to pay $200. So you have your assignment now.

Go.

Re:More Info:

[Keebler71]

It is a shame that the vast majority of the mp3 player market treats the consumers as if we all have precisely the same requirement... I was in the market for one a several months ago and I settled on a 2gb nano. I hated it as it was completely ill suited for my needs. Before I get castigated as a troll, let me explain. I use my mp3 player to listen to music while exercising, listen to language lessons, and listen to podcasts. The latter two drive a requirement to be able to frequently pause and resume, have a large capacity, and have a display (I can think of nothing more painful than to try to find a specific podcast on a shuffle). The exercise requirement dictated that it had to be rugged (I will drop it) or so cheap that I don't care about scratches. What.I founf was that the Ipod interface, while great for playing playlists while strapped to you arm, was very difficult to navigate with one hand while running and sweating on it. There is no tactile feedback to tell you thaqt you have your finger on the right button and presuming you want to do a lot of pausing and playing (language lessons) it can be awkward to hold. The player I ended up exchanging it for (iRiver) fit nicely in my hand and I can easily control playback and song selection without looking at it (and while running).

. Moreover, and this isn't flamebait, I prefer to use windows media player on my pc. I realize that this is not the norm, but I hated the itunes app. It took two updates and three restarts to install, forced me to dl quicktime, and of course was incompatible with my ogg and wma files. My nano had a smaller capacity than my collection, so itunes decided to just randomly select mp3s to synch and then I found it surprisingly non-intuitive to select music to be synched (keep in mind that I was more comfortable with WMP).

Finally, the image thing, looking around my gym I sort-of generated a stereotype for the type of person that used an ipod. It is a very stylish device, but I am not a stylish person... So it just felt too metrosexual for me. By no means is the iRiver perfect, I have lots of complaints... but they mostly fall under categories that are minor to me and it gets the important things right. Forgive typos... Blackberry.

Re:iZZZZZZZ

[Tim Browse]

I actually really don't like the Think Different campaigns - at least, not the ones with pictures of famous people. It always feels like a totally cynical marketing ploy (wonder why) - the accomplishments of these people seem cheapened by the underlying message that if these people had been around today, they probably would have used Macs. Because, you know, you do, and you're just as cool and creative as them, aren't you? It stands to reason.

When Apple dedicated its front page to Rosa Parks when she died, I found that even more icky. I know it was supposed to be a noble and respectful nod to the woman, but it just felt like some marketing bod said "Rosa Parks died yesterday? Cool!". Probably due to the uncontrollably insufferable smugness that permeates every goddamn piece of Apple's marketing copy. It sets my teeth on edge. It's like Apple really wants to hang out with the popular kids.

It's probably just me, though.