SanDisk Sansa Rumors

At the CES 2007 Sandisk has presented the new Sansa players lineup. Among the new products has been Sansa Connect, which showed that the built-in Wi-Fi today is not an innovation but a trend.

Besides the player itself you can find the headphones, necklace, cleaning cloth, USB cable, charger, manual and software CD with Yahoo! Music.

In its look and feel Sansa Connect is a weird hybrid of Creative Zen and Sony Walkman A800. Protruding Wi-Fi module brings to mind antennae of the Ericsson cellphones of the last decade. The body is made of rigid plastic - the player does not catch a scratch even if you'll carrying in a pocket with the keys.

The screen is 2.2 in. and is not the most up to date - it can display only 65 thousand colors. No, it is bright and contrast, looks better than e200 series screen, but slow. This is not a big deal because Connect does not know how to play video. But even graphical user interface is way too slow - every menu action is clearly visible. So it's better to just turn off the icon animation.

The screen resolution is high making photos look brilliant. Viewing angles are strange: when you look at the screen from the left, it's perfectly visible. When you are looking from the right side, you can see virtually nothing, and some colors are heavily wiped out. Brightness can be set in the range from 5% to 100% in 1% steps. Indoors 30% are quite enough. 50% is better for outdoors.


Menu navigation is traditional for all modern players - the wheel and the center button. Two keys under the screen for a variety of action depending on the context. On the left side of Sansa Connect you will find dual side button for volume adjusting. Interestingly, the play / pause is not combined with the center OK button but on the lower side of the wheel. Inconvenient, but usable.

Sansa Connect works with hot-spot standards IEEE 802.11b/g/n. The latest standard is not fully supported nowadays (it havn't yet been finally approved), so SanDisk doen't recommend to use it. The quality of the connection and data transfer speed depends on many factors: the location of Wi-Fi router, the walls configuration and material, etc. In our office Sansa Connect worked at a distance of up to 30 meters from the router. More than enough for the average apartment or cafe.

One of the most important player's feature - microSD card support. Today the maximum size of the cards is limited to 2 GB. SanDisk promises to release firmware upgrade to support SDHC cards - up to 32 gigabytes. But nothing particularly enjoyable here - SDHC card at 4 and 8 GB will appear in the retail stores only in mid 2008, and 32 GB cards - later.

The player automatically recognizes all image and music files stored on the memory card. You can insert any card (for example, from a mobile phone) and immediately see all the pictures and listen to music that are stored on the card. When you plug Sansa Connect to a PC, memory card is defined as a single drive. In other words, the player works as microSD cardreader. But you can not copy files between SD card and player's on-board memory. We will be waiting for the firmware upgrade.

Sansa Connect built-in loudspeaker is as good as can be good miniature loudspeaker. Not enough power, but enough to fill a small room with sound.

Battery life when playing MP3 music is around 12.5 hours. At the same time, when you connect to the Internet with Wi-Fi and playing streaming audio (yes, it's possible), it will cut a half of battery life. Everything depends on the intensity of use. On average, enough juice to play all day long.

Audio quality is average, but better than the e200 series. EQ is disgusting. It's difficult to distinguish 192 kbit/s bitrate from 320 kbit/s.

Managing files is very convenient - Download Manager shows tracks to be downloaded. And when the memory is very low Sansa Connect automatically (with confirmation) erases tracks that were not played for a long time. You can erase not only individual albums, but entire genres.

Sansa Connect is complex and extremely functional. The toy is not for everyone - Sansa Connect demands understanding and a lot of attention, but you'll get a great pleasure instead. Amazon lists it for less than $90. It's a bargain.