Zune Thoughts: The Competition: SanDisk's Sansa Connect

"The stubby little antenna, of course, is the secret sauce. It makes the Connect the most exciting advance in music players, at least in concept, since the iPod Nano. Now, this Sansa is not the first wireless music player. Microsoft's Zune, for one, preceded it. But the Zune's Wi-Fi is wasted. It can't sync with a computer wirelessly or download music wirelessly. All it can do is beam a song to another Zune owner, if there is such a thing. The song self-destructs after three days or three plays. When you are in a Wi-Fi hot spot with the Sansa, though, you can tune into any of 200 Internet radio stations. And if you have signed up for Yahoo's music-rental plan ($144 a year, or $15 a month), you can download all the music you like, straight to the player. No computer necessary. That's a delicious twist indeed. Surely this is the future of music players: instant access to any song, any album, whenever and wherever you are in the mood."

David Pogue reviewed the SanDisk Sansa Connect, and on the whole it seems like a fairly capable device with regard to how the wireless works - so the question is, how did Sandisk end up with such vastly enhanced wireless access compared to the Zune? Was it because they had the buffer of Yahoo Music in between them and the music companies, allowing SanDisk to only focus on the technology aspect of wireless, and not care about the DRM issues? Or was it Microsoft's rushed schedule with the Zune that resulted in the crippled wireless functionality we have now - meaning that the Sansa Connect was in development longer than the Zune and had more time to bake? No matter what the reason is, it seems that the Zune's main differentiating feature - the wireless sharing - is no longer special (if it ever was). Will the Zune ever be as functional as the Sansa Connect? I sure hope so, though I have my doubts if SanDisk maintains their edge.