Competition is good

SanDisk Corp. on Monday introduced a new digital music player that stores twice as many songs as the popular iPod Nano for nearly the same price and cut the cost of existing models ahead of the holiday shopping season.

SanDisk, which is a distant second to Apple in the digital music player market, said it would sell a model of its Sansa player with 8 gigabytes of storage capacity enabling it to save up to 2,000 songs.

The new player will retail at just under $250, SanDisk said. By comparison, a new 4-gigabyte Nano is priced at about $249.

Prices for Sansa players with 2, 4 and 6 gigabytes of storage were cut by as much as 30 percent to a range of about $140 to $220.

"The most costly ingredient in a flash-based (music) player is the flash memory," said Eric Bone, director of audio/video product marketing at SanDisk. "Since we make the flash memory, we essentially remove the middleman and pass that savings directly to the consumer."