Format madness: SlotRadio

Flicking through American Airline's SkyMall I came across SanDisk's bemusing SlotRadio being pushed. I can kind-of see the brainstorm which led to idea - how do we sell the idea of mp3 players to people who don't really want to spend time working out how to download music onto the device - but is that even a market segment worth aiming at?

The product is small player into which you stick the SlotRadio cards - each has 1,000 songs on, and are - of necessity - the equivalents of those TimeLife themed box sets, so come in flavours like 'rock', 'country'. And, erm, that's it. You can swap the cards out, but that's it.

Sure, there might be enough people who don't want to piss about making digital mix collections and uploading them to a fiddly little iPod - but how many of those are going to be persuaded to spend a hundred bucks on a fiddly little player instead?