(Interview Series) - SanDisk has been making a lot of aggressive announcements lately in regards to its Sansa portable music player product line. While the first thing that crosses most of our minds is, "Oh, we have another iPod Killer in the works," SanDisk prefers to believe otherwise. According to SanDisk, the company is looking to be a strong number 2 [competitor] in the market, well ahead of Sony, Creative and others.

According to research reports, Apple holds the largest piece of the digital music player market with approximately 76 percent market share. Although Apple’s position has declined since last year, it continues to remain a leader in an amazingly crowded market.

Earlier this year at the Consumer Electronics Show 2006, Sony and Creative mentioned they were satisfied with their market position and weren’t concerned about the iPod as much as the media thought they were. Obviously, we were shocked with Creative and Sony’s lack of competitive mentality.

SanDisk, however, promised an aggressive stance against the iPod. Clearly, competing against the Microsoft of personal music players is tough, but with a rapid expansion of its Sansa product line, SanDisk expects to gain a bigger piece of the overall market gradually.

In an interview with CoolTechZone.com, the company added, "We're focused on delivering a strong Sansa MP3 product set - quality products that are feature rich with lots of capacity at a great price point. We aim to deliver on this for the consumer, versus tracking the competition."

Unfortunately, the representative very creatively dodged our questions in regards to SanDisk’s strategy against Apple’s iPod, or else we would have gotten good insight into a competitor’s mind and how others perceive Apple.