Thursday, January 8, 2009

If You're Thinking of Buying an MP3 Player or iPod, Just Remember Sandisk Sansa Sucks


Let's face the facts; in terms of initial quality of MP3 players, Apple's ingenious innovation, the iPod leads the way with the ever unpopular Microsoft Zune not that far behind. Then, there's the other guys. It seems these days that everyone is trying to obtain some type of a share of the MP3 player/song/accessory/whatever-the-hell-else market with Sony's Walkman series, Creative's Zen series, Samsung's YP series or- Sandisk's Sansa Series.
How about another cold hard fact: Sandisk Sansa sucks (SSS). I'll give it to you that this device looks very good for its relatively low device but here's why you'll be making a major mistake if you buy one of these.
First of all, you must understand that the website (which, by the way, has some pretty good design) totally distorts how these players look. The web designer nerds actually have some design sense and make the Sansas appear very sleek and cool and iPodish if you will. And just on a sidenote, Sansas are no substitute for the all-mighty iPod; Sansas are not trendy, cool, popular or for that matter good.
To add, the scrollwheel on many of these devices aren't even touch-based and therefore, the flimsy little wheels are very undurable and currently my Sansas scrollwheel and hence total navigation system is experiencing major difficulties.
Also, all of the Sandisk players lack features in a major, major way; in fact, so much so that a few of the main features of their best MP3 are a built-in microphone and video capabilities (no wi-fi, touch screen or event organizer to boast, just a 2.4" screen and a 30-day trial of Rhapsody).
Moreover, virtually every part of the Sansa that I have is intensely faulty and error-filled. Just a few right off the top of my head include random files showing up; an inability to upload new files even though it wasn't even halfway to full capacity; several freezings where I was unable to do anything for about 10 minutes; an unbelievably slow interface where when I press something, it actually has to load for a while; and an inability to show photos although they are on the player and photo-viewing was supposed to be a feature.
Oh yeah, the last thing I have to say is that the battery life of Sansas absolutely suck. The advertisements claim long battery lives but mine barely lasts 5 or 6 hours (only music playback) and I've only had for about a year. The Sansa View's product page says that it has 32 hours of battery life but even though I don't have this player, but I already know that it will only possibly have maybe 15hours.
So all in all, with what I'm seeing with Sansa, I'd just recommend Sandisk to stay with USBs and memory cards, things that they can actually make.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I owned an even earlier Sansa M240 and it sucked. One day while uploading some new music, it bricked itself while "rebuilding the library". Sansa tech support was no help even though their software was clearly defective. They must have crappy engineers to design a product with no hard reset capability.