Are you looking at buying a truly affordable & expandable mp3 player with an LCD screen & FM radio that just works? SanDisk’s newest mp3 player Sansa might just be what you were looking for!SanDisk released recently the Sansa e1xx series, digital music players with either 512 or 1 GB of flash memory. We tested the e130 512 MB model with a variety of mp3s and some wma files.
The device is smaller than the iPod Mini and almost on par with the iPod Shuffle. It features a Power/Menu button, a USB connector, a volume/scrolling wheel button, a headphone jack, a ‘Hold’ button and an SD card slot. It also has a 5-line LCD display with a blue backlight. Under the screen you will find the four-way buttons and an “enter/return” button in the middle used for confirmations.
In the package you will also find a mini USB cable, the driver CD with some extra software, an AAA battery, a plastic see-through case for the player and an armband.
The player shows up as a USB mass storage device on Windows and so it’s easy to mount and drag-and-drop files in it. You can use the device as a way to transfer files to other computers, not just as a music player & FM Radio.
We filled up the device with about 320 MBs of mp3s and a few WMAs we had around. Ogg is not supported, unfortunately (I tried it). Mp3s played without a hitch. Not all of our WMAs worked, though. The old sample I had (from 2000) that was using ’20 kbps, 44 kHz, mono’ did not play back, while the high bitrate 212 Kbps ZZTop song we encoded with WMP9 did play fine. I will give the Sansa the benefit of the doubt, though, in this case, as that old WMA might have been encoded with bugs in it.
The Sansa also supports Audible’s format: You can download digital audiobooks, audio magazines, newspapers, radio programs, and more.
There is also a free account included with AudioFeast which is an unlimited commercial-free radio that you can take with your portable MP3 player (you sync with it). Rhapsody is the media service that Sansa officially supports (no iTunes support). However, the player can synchronize automatically with Microsoft Windows Media Player 10 and is included in the Microsoft PlaysForSure program, enabling you to play purchased/downloaded content from such services as MSN Music, Musicmatch, Napster, Wal-Mart Music Store and CinemaNow.
Sansa’s sound quality is great. Just don’t use the supplied earphones which seem to be too “treble’d” for my taste. I used the supplied earphones, some cheap $10 headphones and some $120 Sony pro headphones. The device indeed produces a very good quality sound, fully comparable to my iPod mini’s. While the supplied earphones do not deliver great sound quality, I must point out here that they come with a “mushroom” design that helps the ear to not hurt after wearing them for too long. With all the other “in ear” earphones I have ever tried (including iPod mini’s), after 15 minutes the soft tissue around my ear starts to hurt. The Sansa’s earphones instead have a mushroom-like design that fits inside your ear and then it expands around it so it doesn’t fall. It’s a very clever design for comfort.
The device supports the SRS*WOW mode that makes music sound extra good. However, ‘good’ is a point of view (as Darth Sidious claims ;). I personally love the feature (short for not having a Dance equalizer presetting) while my husband, who usually listens to rock, doesn’t.
Sansa played without a problem for about 15 hours with SRS-WOW ON before we ran out of battery. It can do about 17 hours with SRS off.
The user interface is excellent. There were reports that the previous SanDisk mp3 models were problematic and difficult to use without reading the manual first, but this one is very intuitive. By pressing the Power/Menu button while the mp3 player is ON it loads the device’s settings. You can sort the playlist by song-name, artist, new music installed, genre etc. Through the settings you can also set the preset equalizer which includes Rock, Jazz, Classical & pop. I was very dissapointed to not see a “dance” presetting but if you use the “Custom” preset, it allows you to create your own mode, so not all is bad. I am currently using either the Rock one or have to have SRS on all the time, otherwise my eurodance upbeat songs as played back make me want to sleep instead of… well… dance. You can also set the device to power off automatically after some time, or go to sleep, and you can tell it to also how long to keep the backlight on (default is 5 seconds, backlight turns on automatically each time you press a button). You can select change the UI in 5 languages and set the date/time. In the Extras you will also find a stopwatch that you can use if you are a sports person. When in the menu mode, the volume wheel can be used as a scroller, so you don’t have to keep pressing “next, next” from the four-way buttons.
The main song display features a small icon to show if the current song plays or is in pause-mode, it includes the Artist, Song Name and Album, and below it you will find a progress bar with the time lapsed. Underneath it, there is the battery icon and the position of the song in the playlist (e.g. 45/81). Pressing the << or >> keys they move to the previous/next song, but if you hold it down, it will fast forward or reverse the current song. The song will seek slower in the beginning but as you keep pressing it will move faster and faster. Lastly, the button below takes care of shuffle/repeat.
I tried its SD slot with both a 1 GB Sandisk SD card and a PQI 512 MB SD card (bought it for just 15 bucks at Frys last week) and both worked like a charm. Today, SDs go all the way up to 2 GB, so the Sansa e140 can max out at 3 GB overall.
I only found four problems with this device:
1. The volume is relatively low even when in 100%. No, I am not deaf, but it’s just not loud enough. The iPod mini is as loud in 80% of its sound level, when compared.
2. There is no automatic sound level correction like the one that exists in the iPod Mini. When you have a song at 128 kbps and then the next one is at 64kbps, it usually is less “loud”. This prompts the user to go adjust the volume to make it sound like the previous one. The iPod is “intelligent” about this and automatically adjusts the default volume in order to serve a consistent experience.
3. Pressing the “next song” button sometimes is not fast enough at switching songs. Sometimes it will follow my button pressings, other times it won’t, and it might be a pause up to 3 seconds until it finds the next song. That’s not a problem if you have 40-50 songs in there, but if you have more than that it starts to be. Please note that the pausing happens only *sometimes* and only when you want to move fast through a list of songs, on normal operation it is perfect.
4. When the screen is not backlit, it’s difficult to read because it’s not bright enough. I have a similar technology LCD on my PalmV, and the Palm is much easier to read under all light conditions.
Thankfully, most of these are software problems and so are easy to fix. The ROM version we were sent was v1.0.0, I am sure eventually fixes will be posted at SanDisk’s site.
The Sansa competes with the iPod Shuffle, not the iPod mini. Comparing the Sansa to my 4GB iPod Mini, the Mini wins out for its bigger screen, bigger storage capacity, third party extras & iTunes support. But comparing it to the Shuffle, the Sansa kills it with a swift kick. The Sansa has an LCD screen which is a huge plus allowing for many useful preferences, it has an FM radio with 20 presets, an included case and armband and I personally prefer its AAA battery over the USB charging which requires external source of power to charge up. And if that were not enough, it’s cheaper than the iPod Shuffle! The Sansa e130 can be found online for just $88 compared to 512 MB Shuffle’s $98 and the Sansa e140 1 GB model can be found for $131.
In conclusion, if you need an mp3 player with up to 2-3 GBs today, get the Sansa, it wins hands down all competition in its category. If you need more storage than that, get an iPod Mini or iPod.
Pros: Great sound quality, super user interface, small form factor, SD slot, case and armband included, nice design, truly affordable.
Cons: Not loud enough , sluggish under some conditions, not so bright screen when not backlit.
Overal: 9/10
no ogg support? wazzzup?
Whenever I install newer video games for PC, I notice that more and more are using ogg. Apparently, the industry does understand the benefits. Are manufacturers of portable players not supporting it for DRM reasons, or am I totally off? As I understand, it also takes more resources to play ogg. Something most portable players lack.
ack. I can just imagine me presing next too many b/c it is too slow
The manufacturer’s site says it requires Windows, but you say it shows up as a USB Storage device. If you add music just by copying it over, it seems to me like it would work on OS X. My GF’s Rio Karma works great on OS X, as a USB Storage Device — hell, it even plays nice with iTunes.
I’m looking for a new music player, and would like one with a radio — this locks out all of the iPod line…
Yes, it does work fine with OSX.
You just drag n drop songs into it from Finder.
I have *a lot* of Ogg and Flac music right there. Those which I’ve bought.
I grab CDs to FLAC and get ogg q7 files from allofmp3.
And mp3 sucks because ID3v1 sucks and ID3v2 sucks even more (Just say, what encoding should ID3v2’s be in? ISO-8859-1? UTF-8? UTF-16? CP-1251? Anyone?).
And ogg does not have any trouble with tags (UTF-8), and it really sound better than crappy 128 CBR MP3’s you get from P2P.
You know you’re a non-issue yourself when you think OGG has lesser quality… Think before you write next time. Yes, it might be bigger for the same quality, but variable bitrate has many advantages.
Ilyak: MP3 sucks because its tagging capabilities are non-standardized? Okay then. For the record, I used an open-source ID3 utiltiy to strip all ID3v1 tags from my MP3s, and converted all of the ID3v2 tags to a standard encoding.
Jacques: You completely missed the point. Good work. An MP3 converted to OGG will sound *worse* than the original MP3. That was what I was saying in my second paragraph.
From the article, apparently under certain circumstances you can use the volume wheel as a scroll wheel.
uh ok, is ogg that bad? I felt like ogg sounded better not worse and actually most media player seem to use less resources playing ogg than mp3? i rip mine from cds as ogg and they seem just fine? of course I am not a connoisseur
But yea I also have a issue with the mp3 licensing, turnabout, ripoff, who knows who pays who for it….
The article title says “truly affordable”, yet I can’t find a price….
>From the article, apparently under certain circumstances
>you can use the volume wheel as a scroll wheel.
Yes, but not when on the “song mode”. In that mode, the volume
wheel only works for volume, not for scrolling through a list.
>The article title says “truly affordable”, yet I can’t find a price..
That’s because you didn’t READ the article in its entirety. The prices are mentioned AND there is a link to a list of stores.
I guess I’m one of those “5” ogg users, although I do have lot’s of mp3’s. I normally encode all my cd’s in flac format for archival purposes and for playing on my SqueezeBox.
When I purchase music from allofmp3 I always encode it in ogg (q7 as well – great minds…) unless it’s something really good and it’s available in lossless format.
The mp3 I have are from *cough* other sources and I have to agree with the chap extoling the virtues of vorbistags. Tags on oggs (as well as flacs) are much better than ID3v* tags. No matter what player I use, they always (if they support ogg and flac) read the tags perfectly. Contrast this with some mp3’s I have that, no matter what I try – stripping them, tagging with different versions, etc – seem to have problems (mangled tags, won’t display tags, etc).
Bottom line. Any portable mp3 player I get WILL support OGG.
A quick search on PriceGrabber reveals that it’s roughly $140 USD.
::A quick search on PriceGrabber reveals that it’s roughly $140 USD.
That’s for the 1 GB model. The 512 MB model (the one reviewed) is $89.
Those “5 people” who use Ogg will soon start dividing in geometric progression, 1 per second, for a couple of years.
If the “mp3” patents are not renewed, this may stop then, but I ain’t so sure.
How is the FM Quality on this? I got an iAudio 5, and while I’m satisfied overall with it, the FM reception was disappointing.
I am also disappointed there’s no ogg support. I use ogg on my iAudio 5, works great. I did a listening test with my etymolic reasearch 4 earphones, and had a very very difficult time telling the difference at 200kbps equivalent encoding. I encoded at 160kbps encoding for the iAudio 5 since it has limited memory. 160 I could fairly consistently tell the difference with the source (FLAC), but it was very minor, and plenty good for portable use.
I think WMA encoding is supposed to be quite good also, however, fairly competitive with ogg. But more support always better, as it sux to have to re-encode to 3-4 different encodings depending on what format your portable supports (i.e., ogg on iAudio, aac on ipod, wma on sandisk).
The U2/G3/5 players – not expandable, but an assload of features
This is the only player I know of that has an option which prevents you from skipping tracks. Anybody who’s an audiobook junkie that has accidentally skipped tracks when they meant t fast forward or rewind knows why you might need this 
Bookmarks work great too.
>How is the FM Quality on this?
It’s good, yes. All the radio stations I usually listen to have good signal.
Mp3/Wma and _Secure WMA_??? What’s this crap all about, they mean crippled WMA I suppose?
It doesn’t support FLAC and not even OGG, this player seems like technology from the 90’s. We do know Microsoft keeps telling you music producers about how great WMA is, but seriously, many of us users feel it’s crap. Yes and what you really should do is just put FLAC+OGG in there and say…. we provide what professionals want… now it’s affordable for the consumer.
Skip the DRM crap
Once again some of you miss the point.
MP3 is a lossy format. OGG is a lossy format.
Going from lossy to lossy results in a loss of quality. Ever saved a JPG as a JPG as a JPG as a JPG … and noticed that the picture basically looked like a turd? The same goes for audio and going from lossy to lossy to lossy …
mp3 has been around forever and MS threw some of their billions behind getting WMA supported in hardware devices.
I definitely would prefer ogg any day of the week but I guess it was just too late.
If you want to legally distribute any mp3’s you are supposed to pay a royalty for each and every file encoded as mp3. That just doesn’t fly for non profit organizations.
99% of my music is in mp3 (as is for most people in the world, let’s face it), my husband has some WMAs though. We have exactly 2 ogg songs at our house.
To standardised encoding?
Which one?
WinAMP beleives that it is CP-1251. JuK thinks it’s UTF-8. TagLib in general things it’s LATIN-1, unless taught. Rhythmbox thinks it’s ISO-8895-1. SO WHAT? Which one should I use?
Provided I want to share music with my friends.
All these players work OK with OGG tags.
And yes, i have some legacy mp3s which i’m not stupid to convert over to ogg. But these mp3’s are such PITA, you know
got to use ID3v1 which IS predictable, at least.
brian: “If you want to legally distribute any mp3’s” you would consider f@king fraunhoufer, or how’s that crappy institute which made their invention cheap whore, right in the ear, unless your country have software patents. It really should not. But Ogg Vorbis is better anyway
Since most of the comments here are about the lack of ogg support in this player, I guess this question isn’t _too_ off topic:
Do anyone know of a good, small, flash-based player that supports ogg? I really want one but haven’t been able to find any…
Btw, whats about tags in WMA?
Are they present? How good are them? Have you tried non-latin letters in them, did they appeared consistently on machines with different locales, on portable devices?
Yes, WMA tags work, but I don’t know about non-latin letters, I only have english songs here (I don’t listen to Greek music, even if I am Greek, as I don’t like it at all).
As for languages, these are the languages supported by the device (you can switch the user interface to one them): English, French, German, Italian and something that looks like chinese.
Send me via email a SMALL russian wma with russian tags to test it for you if you want.
Jacques: You completely missed the point. Good work. An MP3 converted to OGG will sound *worse* than the original MP3. That was what I was saying in my second paragraph.
Do you not understand how lossy formats work? The problem you describe is hardly limited to OGG, that will happen if you transcode from any lossy format to another lossy format.
Your argument is about as valid as me saying “I made a photocopy of a fax and the photocopy looks worse than the fax, therefore fax machines produce better visual output.”
And before someone accuses me of being an OGG fanboi, all my ripped CDs are encoded as either LAME –r3mix or –alt-preset extreme.
Zealothater, I understand you. I feel the exact same way about zealots of any kind. But use the same language one more time and you will be banned. This is not the best way to express your anger and disgust over zealots.
Point taken.
What GNU hippies? Where? I don’t see anyone here who re-encoded their MP3s to oggs. Nor have I ever met such a person. I know lots of people who buy oggs from allofmp3 or convert their store-bought CDs to oggs rather than MP3s, though. I think everyone else’s problem with you is that you’re using a rather obvious straw man argument. There are no such GNU hippies in this thread and as I said, I’ve never met one anywhere else.
For the guy asking about a vorbis-supporting flash player, try the iAudio line (http://eng.iaudio.com/) or iRiver (http://www.iriveramerica.com/).
Please redirect the discussion on this player and its competition rather than the zealots-ogg thingie, or all these comments will be deleted.
Ogg Vorbis (ogg is just the container, vorbis is the audio codec itself…) demands much more cpu power than MP3 for playback. Also, this player usually has some special DSPs for playback of MP3, AAC, WMA and other formats, but most of the CPUs doesn’t have this special suport for vorbis… So, it’s quite dificult for some player to support vorbis (forget all this “small” players for now… usually just the ones that comes from Korea has Ogg vorbis support…), it demands a higher profile CPU and also results in lower playback time…
Apple also don’t support the format for political reasons (they want more people using “their” formats MP4-based plus their DRM…)… so Ogg vorbis is much more a audiophile (also true for FLAC) and geek thing than something that americans/europeans are demanding… Yeah, that’s sad…
http://play.com/play247.asp?pa=genbrw&page=title&r=ELEC&title=50930…
I am not affiliated in any way with play.com, except being a very satisfied customer.
One advantage this device has (in addition to the price) is the fact that it uses normal AAA batteries, so replacing them is really cheap. Use simple (and cheap) AAA NiMH and you’ll never have to worry.
Now about Sansa… this DAP looks good… I’m actually looking for something more higher-profile to replace my Rio Karma (where’s the new generation Rio? Where’s it??!!!)… But I’ll probably recomend it for my friends looking for one to use at gym… Also, SD option is very nice these days! (not memory stick/xD exagerated prices and non-industry standard…)
That’s a good deal, yes. It has voice recording! It doesn’t have FM radio, but other than that it really seems to be a good deal.
Do anyone know of a good, small, flash-based player that supports ogg? I really want one but haven’t been able to find any…
Check this one out:
http://eng.iaudio.com/zeroboard/product_G3.php?bmenu=p&id=cw7000
I own one of these and Ogg works great
The player is recognized like a portable drive and will last at least 30-40 hours on a single AA battery. I do believe FLAC is also supported, but I don’t have any files in that format, so I can’t test it. You can get a model like this with a slightly smaller form factor (which will go about 20 hours on a single AAA) as well:
http://eng.iaudio.com/zeroboard/product_i5.php?bmenu=P&id=cw8000
There’s also a rechargable one that is about the size of a pack of chewing gum:
http://eng.iaudio.com/zeroboard/product_U2.php?bmenu=p&id=cw6000
All three of these players sport the exact same features (though I’m not entirely certain if the last one does Ogg yet or not), with the only differences being form factor and battery life. IMHO, thesse are the absolute BEST flash-based portable music players on the market.
Thanks a lot! iAudio 5 2GB looks exactly like the sort of thing I’m looking for
This kind of devices is obsolete now. Why spending money on a standalone device when my phone has all its features.
Because the kind of phones most people buy don’t have such functionality, neither they are as good delivering the same experience or features. And they usually get expanded through MMC cards that only go up to 512 MBs of RAM and they are too expensive. And these phones are expensive themselves too. I believe that what you are saying will be common ground in phones by 2010 or 2012, but right now, yes, there is still a need for specialized devices. Except if you *already* have a PDA in which case it really can do what an mp3 player can (and usually pdas use SD/CF that are cheaper than MMC). If you don’t have a PDA, still, a dedicated mp3 player is best.
These people don’t care (or understand) that going from a lossy format to another lossy format results in a severe loss of quality, but in their minds, it is justified because OGG is a free/open format, whereas MP3 is closed and evil.
I don’t care. All my rips are in ogg format. I reencoded 128kbps mp3s to 256kpbs oggs and got no noticable loss in quality. In fact, it smoothed out the harsh high-pitch screech I heard from the mp3s. So not all lossy reencodes cause additional noticable distortion.
Its always preferable to encode direct from uncompressed sources. DVD reencoding, for example, will never be better than an encode from the uncompressed source, but until we have 100GB discs we won’t be able to distribute uncompressed video. And even when we do have that technology no MPAA affiliates will give you uncompressed and unencrypted video. But all CDs are uncompressed, so we encode them to FLAC for lossless and ogg for royalty and financially free 10+:1 compression.
128kbps oggs sound just fine. Even 64kbps is bearable. MP3s at those data rates sound like crap.
BTW, I’m a zealot. All you hippie zealot haters seem to barely understand this tech. Go read a book or something.
HAHAHAHHAHAHAHAAHHAHAHAHHAHAH! *gasps*
So you take a sound quality hit, *AND* make your music 2x bigger — all by choice? Don’t make me start again … LOL!
Good job Stephen, you just joined the crowd of people WHO COMPLETELY MISSED THE FUCKING POINT YET AGAIN.
Since your “POINT” was moderated down, maybe you might have, I don’t know, re-iterated it? Seems like the sensible thing to do, at least for those of us who aren’t excitable children incable of expressing ourselves without using profanity.
I hate GNU hippies who re-encode all of their MP3s into OGG purely for philosophical reasons. These people don’t care (or understand) that going from a lossy format to another lossy format results in a severe loss of quality, but in their minds, it is justified because OGG is a free/open format, whereas MP3 is closed and evil.
I’m sure everyone here is really proud of you and all, but I’m not exactly sure how that reflects on OGG.
Eugenia, mmc cards are upto 2gb, and brandname 1gb one costs about $70. As for phones being expensive, nokia 6230 is $260, siemens sx1 is $230, etc.
By the way, phone w/mp3 provides better experience, because it automatically pauses the playback when incoming call arrives, so you’ll never miss the call while listening.
Great.
That’s one thing I don’t like about Ipods (no fm radio).
>That’s one thing I don’t like about Ipods (no fm radio).
If they add FM radio, all new songs will be played on the radio one time or another. This can LIMIT the amount of iTunes sales because people will be hearing these new songs on radio. It’s a strategy decision for Apple to not include radio.
I wish there would be more commecical support for Lossloss format (IE: flac, ape, shn and so forth). Looks like a capable otherwise.
Anyone know of a 512 player (flash) that does flac?
iRiver has similar players that support Ogg Vorbis. Ideally, Ogg on flash players and Ogg + Flac (with good hardware) on HD players.
mmmm so what os does this MP3 player run on???… did I miss something…. osnews.com???
turning into review.com…..
If this is compeating with iPod Shuffle why is the size of iPod Shuffle not in the picture….?
metal or plastic??
how much does it weigh??
does the sd cards eject like on a pda??
how well manufatured is this device??
you say
Cons: Not loud enough , sluggish under some conditions
then give this device 9/10…
does this mean you don’t listern to music while on the train for example… can this device blockout background nose so you can listern to your lovely tunes???
sluggish do you like sluggish… is it the processor lacking???? is this a problem or a feature…
and still 9/10 ???
>sluggish do you like sluggish… is it the processor
> lacking???? is this a problem or a feature…
Read the review in its entirety. The sluggish thing is ONLY about “next song” button pressing, it’s not about the normal operation of the device. I was clear about this.
>how much does it weigh??
The info is already in the web page linked and on any store page.
>does the sd cards eject like on a pda??
Yes. Does it really matter though?
> metal or plastic??
Plastic. It’s way lighter than the ipod mini.
>mmmm so what os does this MP3 player run on???…
>did I miss something…. osnews.com???
Yes, you obviously do. It probably has no real OS in it at all, and that’s perfectly fine.
Just because you have special questions (that some are easy to find at the product page) it doesn’t mean that the review was ‘cheap’.
And yes, the device is good for 9/10. It has minor quirks, they are not important or persistant. The device is a GOOD mp3 player and it’s extremely affordable. This makes it a kick ass purchase.
“Read the review in its entirety”
I did hence I got questions and asked…
pressing for the next song and its sluggish is even for a small % of time is a negative IMHO…. clicking next for my fav song knowing its coming on waits one two three tiny intro no thats not the song I know its here somewhere one two three next one two three… count in seconds seems to take forever hmmm…
wont plastic dent and mark a lot more? (some plastics are so easy to damage they wont last five minutes of normal every day use).. what sort of quality is this device… some plastic phones are ok some are useless.
Cons: Not loud enough
can this device blockout normal background noise in say a busy train station???
seems SanDisk has paid some money for this advert…
> sluggish is even for a small % of time is a negative IMHO
I made it clear that this happens SOMETIMES and under SOME conditions. It is NOT the default behavior.
>can this device blockout normal background noise in say a busy train station???
This depends on your earphones/headphones mostly, not the device.
>seems SanDisk has paid some money for this advert.
How about you email me your real name and phone number and have my laywer contact you for making such baseless accusations and defaming my work?
“I only found four problems with this device:”
“Thankfully, most of these are software problems and so are easy to fix.”
how can point 1, 3 and 4 be singled out as software problems and how can a prospective purchaser have any faith that they will be fixed.
the volume on a player can be the hardware…
flakey next button
“it’s not bright enough.” style of screen used.
Ogg is more cpu intensive than mp3 wich means it’s costs more to make ogg capable devices.
I thought the review was good, but I need ogg.
Nice product otherwise. Looks like a real iPod/mini competitor.
I have been looking at upgrading my older creative mp3 player. I have pretty much decided on this one.
http://www.lexar.com/ces/Data%20Sheet_LDP800.pdf
MP3,WMA,OGG
Radio Recording and broadcasting
voice recording and SD support
hi there,
i dont know how much people from germany is here (i am, so i guess there is some more)
i bought recently viruzz mp7mxII player. It has SD slot for up 2 2GB cards. It has already 64 MB of memory, radio with 20 stations, recording via microphone or fromradio. Sound has very nice quaity however i can not compare it with ipod or sandisk players. I tested however hamma payer with sd slot also, and must say that its much more better. The player costs around 64 euro, with 512 GB card the price ould be around 110 Euro which is similar to Sandisk with 512 MB. if somebody is interested in seeing the player u can go to viruzz.com
Funny thing is that they are presesnting themselves as some american company, hower whois database shows that the site is registered by some german company. Also i could not find any viruzz player which is buyable not in germany (ebay, amazon, google my search engines)
Do anyone know of a good, small, flash-based player that supports ogg? I really want one but haven’t been able to find any…
The iRiver iFP 700/800 look quite nice. Flash, ogg support, and from 128Mb to 1Gb. They work on one AA battery:
http://www.iriver.at/flash_player.html?p_id=157&L=0&view=features
I found the 1Gb iFP800 for 169 euros, so it’s not that cheap however.
it doesn’t support Ogg Vorbis, AAC or say… FLAC.
what the hell is doing an mp3player review here? i supposed this was OSNews and not Engadget.com…
I hope this wont become the standard of articles here…
PS I like mp3 players and reviews but I dont think this is the right place for them…
>> How about you email me your real name
>> and phone number and have my laywer
>> contact you for making such baseless
>> accusations and defaming my work?
Jesus. It DOES look like a goddamn ad, atleast with that summary on the front page. Rephrase “Are you looking at buying a truly affordable & expandable mp3 player with an LCD screen & FM radio that just works? SanDisk’s newest mp3 player Sansa might just be what you were looking for!” and you might not get as many complaints.
Again, the way you presented you review, DO make it smell like an advertisement.
This kind of devices is obsolete now. Why spending money on a standalone device when my phone has all its features.
If you find a phone with the same featues as my iAudio player:
– Auto resume
– Bookmarking
– Detection on PCs without drivers, and works on Mac & Linux
– About 40 hours of battery life
– High quality EQ settings
– 1GB of memory
– The size of a zippo lighter
– FM playback, voice recorder, direct mp3 encoding
– etc, etc …
See, the problem with the kind of ‘convergence’ you are advocating is that you end up with devices that are the jack of all trades, and the master of none. Software is the same way (eg: iTunes).
The article is clearly an ad. Positive review on a tech website == free mp3 player for the reviewer. This is really boring, osnews used to be a great website because it was focused. Selling out is so 1999.
as i said…. too funny
> I hate GNU hippies who…
And I totally hate people who hate people!
My next review is about a PVR. YOU BETTER GET USED TO IT, OSNews is NOT about operating systems. If you don’t like it, you are FREE to never visit again, I don’t care. How many times do we have to say that OSNEWS IS NOT about operating systems but it’s a GENERAL tech site? HAH? How many times???
And the review was not “an ad”. If you actually READ the review, you would see that it is not all rosy. The device **IS** a good purchase, but it has its quirks, all mentioned.
Wow, OSNews is not about operating systems?? Since when? I could’ve sworn the OS stood for Operating System… All these year’s I guess I’ve been wrong.
Why not just run google ads? I mean they are certainly less obtrusive, at least people know their ads before clicking them.
> Since when?
Since 2001.
If you want this to be a general tech site, so be it. But don’t disguise it as something else. This site first and foremost is named OSNews. Also the forums have no section whatsoever thats dedicated to non-OS talk. And even your own submit news page says this:
“OSNews.com is always interested to hear from you the latest news on a vast range of Operating Systems and related technlogies, from the well-known mainstream OSes, down to small, amateur, personal or embedded ones.”
I don’t have any problem in this being a general tech site, but don’t try to disguise it as something it isn’t.
NO, you are MISTAKEN. We are interested in hearing from readers about OSes, but OSNews IS NOT (I repeat: it is not) just about OSes.
Read our CONTACT US page instead which states the GOAL of OSNews, a message that’s there since 2001:
http://www.osnews.com/contact.php
> But don’t disguise it as something else
We never did! OSNews is about computing in general, IT ALWAYS WAS about computing and geek stuff in general.
>This site first and foremost is named OSNews.
So what? The domain name HAPPENED to be what it was because OUR PRIMARY focus *IS* OSes. But this is NOT the ONLY focus!! We market OSNews as a generic, computing/tech site, NOT about exclusively about OSes.
http://www.Onion.com does not mean that it’s about onions! Neither imDB.com means “I am a database”. Neither “rootprompt.org” is only about the root user. Jesus, not even OSViews.com is about OS opinions only, it’s also about “anything interesting today in the tech world”. That’s how it works, we DO NOT want a narrow focus because this means LESS visitors.
For the last freaking time: OSNews WAS, IS and WILL ALWAYS BE about computing in general, but with some more focus in OSes. That’s all there is to it. If something is geekly interesting, it’s GOOD ENOUGH to be publised on OSNews.
🙂
Its good to be mistaken as you get to learn more then when being holly right all the time……
although I stand by my thoughts regarding this “whatever you want to call it” its advertising this product for what seems little reason…. sd mp3 players have been around for a couple of years and cheaper…!
the first sign of someone having a different view and you talk about contacting your laywer, if you dont want pubic to create comments then remove them from the site…
if you dont want people to highlight problems with your review then write a better review…. three poorly taken pictures… and marketing information….
I also think its misleading… with regards to upgrades to the software that this device uses… theres no link a statement from sandisk saying they will in future fix any software problems in the future on already purchased devices (what normally happens is they release model 00000.1 and hope people upgrade cause they are so fed up with whatever problem. (If they are software problems in the first place).
your website your welcome to do what you like with …
just wonder why u dont have other sections/pages for your other tech stuff…
if you feel quality it needs to be watered down to grab more attention then thats up to u.
PVR has more to do with Operating Systems then a plastic sd card holder and headphone holder.
Just depends the quality of the review…
spending £1000.00 for locked down xp media centre is just wasteful.
O(ther) S(tuff) news.com
maybe
I like the fact that this site covers more than just OSes. I would not read it as often if it was only about one subject.
I have to say that the review quality is below average for this mp3 play. The main reason is that the author did not spend enough time to test the product. There are a lot of problems with this product. And I hope OSnews does not lower its quality even though it is only a mini-review of a cheap mp3 player. Here is some user opinions from amazon and Cnet:
*****
Two things that annoy me:
1. When I choose an album, it seems to play the songs in an arbitrary order (no, shuffle is not turned on). As first I thought it was alphabetical, but one album is not in alphabetical order. I would like it to play the album in track number order. I’ve checked the files and the file name has the track number and the Track Number field in the ID3 tag also has it (according to Windows XP) — what gives?
2. When you go to the radio, it always seems to forget what station you were listening to. This is true whether you go there from listening to MP3 files or by turning it off in radio mode and then turning it back on. It remembers that it was in radio mode, but forgets the station, so you end up listening to static on FM 87.5 (all static, all the time).
******
Added on 4/25/05:
In my initial review, I forgot to mention two things. The Sansa ignores your file organization so don’t bother trying to setup seperate folders for different genres of music. This is why I warned before to make sure that the music you have is named and tagged properly because it does allow you to play songs by artist, album, date added to player, and so on (let’s hope SanDisk fixes this with some software upgrades). Also, there is about a 1-2 second lag when switching between songs. This can get a little annoying at times but you will get used to it. To be fair, one more upside is that I added a 1G SD card (SanDisk Ultra II) and after the initial 60 seconds to read the card and update the playlist, it doesn’t miss a beat. I still really enjoy this mp3 player.
Added on 05/02/05:
My Sansa has started to drink batteries like I drink Coke. Not sure why; it could be using extra juice to read music on the SD card. I may have to purchase rechargeable batteries if this keeps up. I got 6 hours of playing time out of my last battery. My fiancee’s Sandisk (a flash memory player, no expansion slot) goes about 15 hours on a AAA battery. Not sure why the huge discrepancy between our two Sandisk players but my best guess is that my batteries are being drained reading the memory card. It would be helpful if someone out there with some knowledge about this would write a review.
***********
in your opinion (anyone), what is the best MP3 player that supports SD or CF memory upgrades? the only requirement is that it must not limit the size of the SD or CF card (since it seems many, such as Rio, only allow up to 512 MB SD card). This is purposely vague because I would like a variety of responses since the only player i could find that is currently available and that does this seems to be the Sansa, and I would like to know about alternatives.
Thanks,
J
Just got off the phone with SanDisk support who confirmed that the Sansa players do not have a resume feature. This means that if you power it off it cannot be set to continue at the same location when you power it back on.
This is a critical feature for audio books or large MP3 files!!! Come on SanDisk – get it right! Add this important feature with a firmware update!!
Hi, does it support fm recording and voice recording? can i download, let´s say, a movie or a game to it and take it to another PC? Thanks.