Fiendishly clever, SanDisk. You innocently put out this Sansa e140 Digital Audio Player at a reasonable price, out of the apparent goodness of your heart. A backlit multi-line LCD, 1 GB of storage space, plays MP3s and WMAs along with all the various Plays for Sure purchased download files – heck, you even threw an FM tuner into its compact chassis. Pure benevolence, SanDisk.

But don’t most people want to listen to more than 240 songs? That’s where this happy tale turns sinister.

See, the Sansa e140 has an SD slot that will accommodate memory cards up to 2 GB (not included). So we can triple its capacity up to, oh, 700 typical MP3s. And if we buy multiple cards and swapping them out as you choose, our portable music library is limited only by our SD card budget. But where, oh, where shall we get these cards? Pray tell, might there be a company around here somewhere who will sell us some?

Indeed there is. Its name is SanDisk.

Dope pushers hook the kiddies with free samples. Fast-food pushers sell their burgers cheap, making their real money on the overpriced soda and fries. And SD card pushers manufacture affordable MP3 players to entice the next generation of customers. As we said, fiendishly clever – or maybe that should be cleverly fiendish. But the thing is, with these features at this price, we don’t really mind getting hooked.

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