SanDisk's Unveils Lil' Monsta

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When SanDisk Corporation launched a viral "blogosphere" campaign last month called iDon't - with a humorous take on conformity involving a certain ubiquitous digital audio player with white earbuds - it triggered a worldwide debate. Some partisans cried "foul" while others hailed the effort for encouraging MP3 player alternatives and open music platforms. An iDon't website depicted whimsical posters and tee-shirts with slogans such as iSheep, iFollow and iChimp. Some of the faithful "i" followers laughed along with the satire, while others took offense at the images.

The iSheep have been replaced by SanDisk's new mascot - the Lil' Monsta. Users who click on the iDon't website now will see the ravenous creature leading viewers to its lair - a new website that explains the features of SanDisk's Sansa digital media players. The Lil' Monsta devours all sorts of digital content - including music, movies, videos and photos. And, with a seemingly insatiable appetite, it demands to be fed constantly.

Lil' Monsta, created by Grey San Francisco, SanDisk's advertising agency, will be running amok on its own website, looking for content to ingest. The Lil' Monsta website shows, in clever animations, the distinguishing Sansa features such as a larger color screen, voice recorder, FM radio, microSD expansion slot, durable rear metal casing and user-replaceable lithium-ion battery. Like the Lil' Monsta, Sansa owners can just keep feeding their devices. Beyond the Internet, Lil' Monsta also will show up on future packaging for SanDisk's flash-memory-based Sansa players and on in-store displays.

The Sansa e200 player is offered in capacities of from 2 gigabytes to 6 GB, with an additional 1GB possible from the largest available microSD card from SanDisk. That allows users to expand the amount of content they can store in their players and to easily swap out music between devices with microSD slots.

Also, in contrast to a proprietary or closed system of selling music online - in which songs can be played only on designated players - the Sansa e200 supports an open platform, accepting the broadly-used MP3 and WMA music formats (downloads plus subscription). The Sansa e200s also are Microsoft PlaysForSure compliant, which means they can take advantage of numerous music service providers such as Rhapsody, Yahoo Music and Napster.

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