Customer Reviews:
 Great player. No hassle October 27, 2006
19 out of 21 found this review helpful
Overall this a great player with many capabilities. The FM tuner, voice recorder, pics, and video are specs that everyone knows but it comes together nicely here. Replacable battery is always a plus.
Sound is great. If you don't like what you have you can manually adjust the equalizer settings. There are many to choose from. You might want to invest in some higher quality headphones though. The factory set isn't bad at all, but you could go better.
I've heard a lot of complaining about the scroll wheel and the buttons. The wheel is easy to use and DOES NOT JAM as some other tend to think. Yea the Ipod click wheel is nice.. but this isn't an ipod is it..? When pushing buttons, it seems that your pushes does not register but it does. No issues there.
Battery Life is great. Running through the menu, playlists, and all the other functions obvioulsy drains the battery but not significantly. It'll last for at least 9 hours depending on usage.
Ease of use: You can't go wrong with this player, and it is incredibly straight forward. The installation cd gives you a user manual just in case you have any questions but you can figure it out yourself by just running through the menus.
File transfer and media converter is straight forward. To easily create playlists the cd will update your windows media player, so make sure you install it. Media player tends to be moody at times, but once you start dragging and dropping your files, its easy.
Just something to point out. An earlier review said that the boot time was around 5 minutes or so. That's totally exaggerated. I have a little under 6GB of USED space and it takes about 10 seconds max to boot.
Obviously, you should take care of your player. Buying a case is a best bet even though it comes with a slim fabric case. Take care of the player and it'll take care of you
 nice feature set, nice look, easy to use October 23, 2006
13 out of 15 found this review helpful
I'll admit that I've never owned any iPod, so I cannot directly compare this unit with a Nano. Why buy a Nano, though, when the Sansa with equivalent flash memory has additional features and costs much less? Sure, the Nano's interface (the click wheel) is a little easier to use, but that's not worth a 35% premium while sacrificing features such as video playback and an FM tuner.
My previous player was one of the Sansa e100 series. This player is a definite upgrade beyond the obvious (color screen, larger capacity, video playback). It definitely sounds much better than the e100 (and I was basically satisfied with that player's sound once I had tweaked its equilizer to my liking). The interface is a lot nicer than the e100. As others have written, the buttons around the scroll wheel are small but this hasn't presented a problem so far. The menu system is so straight-forward that you don't really need to refer to the manual to use the player, though I would recommend looking at the manual at least once if you plan to put any video content on the player.
Contrary to some other reviewers' opinions, I think this player has a nice, not cheap, look. I don't know whether it's identical in form to the lower capacity players in the same series; if not it seems much nicer in my hand than those players did when I briefly handled them at a local store.
I'm quite satisfied with this player so far, but I've only had it for about one week. A word of caution to would-be purchasers: I had originally ordered this from Amazon and, according to their customer service, they don't know when they will get more units in (despite the website saying "in stock"). I was given a delivery estimate of approximately two months away, so I canceled my order and went elsewhere.
Great Alternative to Apple's Proprietary Garbage October 20, 2006
30 out of 32 found this review helpful
Let me start by saying that this thing is really small. I saw the pictures and even some video reviews on youtube, but I was still pleasantly surprised at how tiny this player actually is. My Motorola Razor cellphone dwarfs it.
It's cheap, so unless you're a dedicated Apple user (i.e. have more money than brains), you're getting a great bargain.
I got it mainly because of nice size and compatibility (no need for dealing with iTunes - this baby looks just like another drive to your comptuer, which means drag and drop support for files).
I wasn't expecting much from video - but changed my mind, after being able to watch tv series episodes on it during my commute to work, or full movies during recent flights. The resolution/quality of the LCD is simply amazing.
FM tuner gets great reception, even in my basement - not to mention the fact that I can quickly record a new song directly off the radio, so that I can listen to it later.
The only downside I can list at the moment is the button interface - the rotating wheel could be a little more depressed, to make pressing buttons around it easier, but you get used to it really fast.
Other than that - this device is definitely the way to go. I couldn't be more happy with the purchase.
 This is some headache-causing hardware! October 18, 2006
19 out of 44 found this review helpful
My beloved Zen Micro Photo's hard drive died, but thankfully, I had Big Box Retailer's extended warranty on it. Unfortunately, they no longer stock that unit, so I had to pick out another one. The Sansa looked like the best out of the bunch: Small, high-quality screen, video playback, high capacity, flash-based, and most importantly, it had a built-in voice recorder.
Almost from the outset, there were problems. I don't use any online music services, so having Rhapsody foisted upon me was an immediate annoyance. The media manager application had a propensity to randomly crash, particularly in the middle of file transfers. Not good. The design felt very badly thought out, with a mechanical scroll wheel that feels rough and gets stuck (I see why Apple dumped them!), and buttons that are tiny, hard to press, and don't feel like they're being pushed when they are.
But the real deal-killer for me was a problem I don't think many others will experience: I have a great deal of music whose filenames and ID3 tags are written in Japanese characters. The Sansa's US firmware does not support Japanese (and other Asian languages as well, I'd assume), and as a result, the player will choke whenever it's asked to play a file with even one Japanese character in it. Since about half my music library fits that description, and it would take forever to go back and manually rename all those files in English, I was extremely annoyed. Perhaps a firmware flash would fix it? I tried to get some firmware of Sandisk's Japanese site, but they don't have any direct downloads. Maybe the newest US firmware has Asian language support, I thought to myself. I found the firmware, unzipped it, and loaded it onto my player.
Dead as a doornail. Tried it again. And again. And again. At that point, I just gave up.
Some people don't seem to have any problems with this. Well, more power to you, I guess, but based on my experience, this is NOT something I would recommend. If you're in the market for an iPod alternative, Creative's units still offer the best combination of features, functionality, and design.
Now I just need to figure out what I'm gonna buy after I return this thing.
Prettty good - keep trying October 14, 2006
10 out of 11 found this review helpful
Happy to see that this player (compared to e140) would resume playback where it left off after turning off. Resets volume to 50% on power up(?) though! I had the opposite problem than what this is probably supposed to prevent. I usually am listening at reduced volume so that I can hear what's going on in the background, only to get blasted after turning the unit back on. Player needs some way easy to bulld playlists internally. Sound and battery life are very good. The more storage capacity a player has, the more the manufacturer really needs to think about the interface and software. But I'm pretty particuar about the order that I want to play back my tunes. It's not easy being me :-) Windows Media player for a front-end? Don't think so! I may sell this and look at the Creative one even though it' not as small. I hate their (Creative) software, but at least it has something.
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