It had to happen -- a Nano clone. There was just no way around it, we checked. The force of giving in to copying a proven model is just too much and Samsung and SanDisk have given in like good Catholic girls at the prom.

Enter Samsung's YP-Z5 and SanDisk's Sansa e200, two players that tweak on the Apple model just enough so as to keep Sue-e Steve away. Samsung's model even comes in identical capacities, two and four gigabytes of flash coupled with a size almost identical to the Nano. Where the Samsung model exceeds, though, is in the reported battery life -- a staggering 38 hours in comparison to Apple's 14-hour claims.

SanDisk, on the other hand, is now reporting 128 hours, a hard-to-believe claim. We'll have to see if those numbers stay true when SanDisk prepares to ship its product in March. Samsung should be good to go in February.

[Via, The Register]