SanDisk® Cruzer® Blade™ USB flash drive

My ever increasing list of email newsletters just informed me today that SanDisk has yet another addition to their ever decreasing size of USB sticks. Now you can put one of these puppies on your keychain and it won’t take up any more room than a nail clipper. Your choice of 2GB, 4GB, 8GB, or 16GB variations. Right now, presumably because they are new, prices start at $14.99 and go up from there, but we all know that deals will appear eventually to fall in line with the other dwindling and current storage drive tariffs. In the meantime, need and convenience may prevail. so now you know.

Check out the Cruzer Blade HERE.

Taking a quick stroll through the electronics section of a major retail store the other day, looking at all of the things I didn’t need or couldn’t afford, I spotted an 8 GB SanDisk brand microSD (HC) card.  It wasn’t a shock, as I new the store carried them, but then I noticed the price!  A whole, whopping $31.88.  Yep, that’s it.  Now before you think how crazy I am, this isn’t to tell you that this is a fantastic deal; a person is likely to find a better offer at other stores and definitely when shopping online.

What stood out about the price to me is how it compared to my first purchase of an external card.  It is a rather fond memory: my first external card of any type was a 32 MB SanDisk brand CompactFlash card.  It was to expand the 8 MB internal memory of my Oregon Scientific Osaris.  I was so happy on the day it became mine, even though the price was a hefty $125.00 (it was 1999 when it was purchased).

Back from memory lane, later in present day afternoon, I started thinking about cost per megabyte.  It turns out I paid approximately $3.91 / MB for my 32 MB CompactFlash (bought in 1999) .  For the SD card, on the other hand, a person would pay approximately $.0038916/MB.

PS:  Don’t tell my wife you read this, or before she’ll let me purchase my next memory card, she’ll encourage me to wait for another 10 years, throwing around cost per MB breakdown and how much more I’ll get for my money!

Wow, we have spent a lot of time here, going through the highs and lows of these six media players.  For those of you just joining us, go back and reread the whole Listen To This Series.  we have compared every aspect of six media players, including the hardware, accessories, controls, menus, syncing, sound, video, photos, battery, memory, wireless connections, and pretty much anything else which could be compared.  Now that all of that comparison is done, the only question remaining is what came out on top.  well, hit the jump to see where I landed on this one.

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Before we get to the exciting Listen To This finale, we have one more stop to make on the road to High Fidelity.  Tonight, I want to take a quick look at the battery life and memory capacities of these players.  Obviously, these are pretty important stats.  Without good memory capacity, you will find yourself listening to the same song time and again.  Without battery life…well, you are going to be one frustrated listener.  So, let’s take a closer look.

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This is going to be a pretty short entry to the series.  Every one of these players is able to store and display photos.  But let’s be honest, that is really not the main draw of any of them.  No one buys an iPod or a Zune or any of the others for photos.  You can get a cheap $10 digital picture frame to carry on your keychain if that is all you want.  Still, the fact that these do display your photos is a nice added benefit.  So, let’s see how they do.

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