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July 5, 2005

Review: Sandisk Sansa

It’s smaller than a business card and about half an inch thick. The small display screen shows what’s available to play, what’s playing and the run time.

The tiny Sansa is also an FM radio, and you can preset it for up to 20 stations. It comes with earphones; one triple-A battery powers the device and is normally good for 17 hours of playing time.

The Sansa player comes with removable flash memory cards. This makes it extremely handy in a couple of ways: For one, you can store different styles of music on separate cards and have a kind of miniature record collection. A dozen of them would easily fit in a small pocket.

Second, you can use it as an ordinary external drive and store data on flash memory. These now come in sizes up to 2 gigabytes. It’s expensive storage compared to an external disk drive, but ultraportable.

This was one of our best recent new products. Amazon sells it for $100 with a 512 MB (megabyte) card, which holds eight to 16 hours of music, depending on whether you use the MP3 or WMA compression format. You can change cards any time, inserting smaller or larger capacities.

Posted by pajaro at July 5, 2005 7:03 PM