Mindful Musings

I recently sold off my iRiver H120 on eBay and replaced it with a Sandisk Sansa e260 from Amazon for about $120 including shipping. As a side note, Amazon is simply wonderful. They are fast, courteous, and have price matched their own site and refunded me the difference in the price of the product since it went down. That is how to handle customer service.

Anyways, the Sansa e260 is definitely a good product. It is small, mostly lightweight, sleek and the screen is very clear and bright. You can upload songs, pictures and videos through the Windows Explorer or use a program like Rhapsody of Windows Media player to upload/control your music and create playlists etc. I primarily bought the Sansa to avail of the Music to go from Rhapsody and it has definitely been a pleasure and I am enjoying every minute of it. However, this is a review of the Sansa and I will stay away from talking too much about Rhapsody.

The scroll wheel is very smooth and works well with the software. I do have a problem with the smaller buttons around the scroll wheel since my fat fingers cannot get around to them too well but I think I have a feel for it now. The sound is very clear and loud (there is a loudness setting on the device beside the volume) and the player runs on the provided Lithium Ion batteries for approx 18 hours (more like 15 hours with frequent turning on of the LCD). I am not as fond of the headphones that come with the Sansa, but that was a given. I own a pair of Phillips set of sound isolating headphones that I love and will continue to use. Many of the features of an MP3 player are well manifested in the Sansa e260 including basic navigation, sound controls, equalizer, playlists shuffle etc. One note about playlists is that if you download a playlist from Rhapsody, the only way to get that playlist onto the player is to sync the device through Rhapsody.

One of the annoyances is the only way to charge the Sansa is by using the provided USB cable and it does not come with an extra wall charger. The other peeve is that the radio uses the provided USB cable as an antenna so if you want to receive FM transmissions that are a little faint, they are very noisy without that cable (the cable does not have to be plugged into a computer).

Overall this is a nice player with a lot of features and a small price tag. I look forward to finding lots of new music and enjoying it with Rhapsody and the Sandisk Sansa e260.