1. Introduction

It seems like an obvious idea: with so much music available online, why do you have to tether a media player to a computer to get content? Questions of battery life and copyright protection have dogged OEMs’ attempts to make and sell wireless players and Microsoft’s attempts to offer legal music sharing over wireless with the Zune haven’t fired the market with enthusiasm.

The iPod Touch offers WiFi Web browsing but the only music you can download wirelessly is new purchases from the iTunes store. Toshiba has wireless players for the Japanese market but so far only Archos and SanDisk have products for North America (the Archos 605 WIFI and the Sansa Connect). So are they in the vanguard of a new trend or is there a reason most players plug in to load up?

Sansa Connect

The Connect looks like a chunkier version of a standard music player, with a protruding aerial at the top. It’s particularly chunky for a 4 GB player with a 2.2" screen but with a MicroSD slot and the WiFi connection, you get a much larger choice of music than with a much smaller 4 GB iPod nano. There’s even a built-in speaker that you can set to turn on automatically when you unplug the headphones - much better than offering a friend one earbud.

The Connect has the familiar blue-lit scroll wheel of most Sansa players, with separate volume controls on the side and two soft buttons for the extra options that come with wireless. Press the Home button at the top of the scroll wheel for colorful icons illustrating the different functions, most of which use wireless one way or another.

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