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.
As you might guess, the player could be shaken - thus managing music. For example, if you shake it while music is on, Sansa Shaker switch to a new song. Such technology is not used for the first time: Sony NW-S200 Sport Walkman also offers a songs change by shaking feature, but Sony's player in the form of a thin cigar is not intended for children, obviously.
On the other hand, Shaker will enable children to enter the world of digital music. SanDisk definitely thought about the target audience designing Sansa Shaker design. Its form is ideal for small hands, and the player about the size of the average salt-shaker - no danger of swallowing small details.
Navigation is quite simple - you need to shake the device to switch to another song or spin the ring at the bottom to go to the next or previous melody. Another ring at the top is the volume controls. As always should be done in the case of the MP3 players for children, SanDisk Sansa Shaker is equipped with two sets of a headphone jack, so you can listen to music together. This player is not equipped with a built-in memory, but the SD card can be installed in the SD slot, which is hidden under the cover below (also you can find standard mini-USB port and AAA battery slot there).
Given the MSRP of $39, it's still too expensive to be included into McDonald's Happy Meal, but who knows what the future will bring us.
SanDisk Sansa Shaker mostly interesting because of its design. It looks like colorful fancy salt-cellar. You can fast froward/backward and adjust the volume by turning the white rings. But the most fascinating is what you need to do to jump to another song — just shake it!
Sansa Shaker is powered by one AAA battery and uses SD cards as memory so you can take with you as much songs and as much juice as you need.
It comes in two colors: blue and pink — for boys and girls respectively. For quite social boys and girls, that's would be correct. SanDisk Sansa Shaker is equipped with a speaker on its top and two earplugs' jacks.
Watch this video review to get a clue how Sansa Shaker working:
Current SanDisk portable media players range consists of 10 products (or series). Let's take a closer look at the every single one of them.
Sansa e200, m200, c200 and Express series are virtually the same as many other MP3 players on the market. They can be confused with the others on the shelf. However they are more than hi tech enough. E.g. SanDisk Sansa Express is the world's first cordless (just like a thumb-drive) MP3 player with the microSD slot. Not bad for the tiny flashdrive player.
Sansa View is the direct competitor to the Apple's iPod and Microsoft's Zune MP3 players. Actually, the name 'MP3 player' is too traditionalist's for such device. I'd prefer to call it pocket sized media center. Not only because you can watch movies or read ebooks on the go. There are a lot of third-party accessories like dock stations and FM transmitters dedicated to SanDisk Sansa View and Sansa e200 series players.
Another great distinction of the Sansa View which stands it out from the closest competitors is a flash memory. Well, Zune and iPod which are HDD based offering more storage but SanDisk Sansa View much more reliable because its built-in flash memory didn't suffering from the vibrations of any kind like hard disk drives. Unless you are using your player only at home sitting on the coach you are constantly shaking and shocking it. Too bad for HDD based players.
All those models described above are of the pretty common kind though SanDisk has some really unusual thing in the sleeves. Let's talk about them in the next posts.
Current Sandisk portable media player line-up can't be definitely subdivided into several large categories. Instead of that Sandisk has solid core of classy looking MP3 players (with video capabilities) and several unique and even bizarre solutions.
Base core of Sandisk players are pretty usual and competing directly with Apple iPod, Microsoft Zune and Creative Zen as well as horde of less known and no-name devices that could be found on shelves of Wall Mart, BestBuy and RadioShack. Thin and light black bricks equipped with large bright color LCDs, from two to 32 gigabytes of built-in flash memory and handy back-lit control wheels. But there are something that makes difference.
Most of Sandisk Salsa media players are equipped with built-in SD or miniSD cardreader. What does it mean? Black brick is not just a brick from now. It's expandable! You can easilly upgrade it by adding 1Gb, 2Gb or even 8Gb memory card. You can take more than one card with you and change them on the go. You can even share the music or videos with your friends without computer.
Steve Jobs thinks different, he thinks that you need to buy expensive and inconvinient add-on for iPod just to listen to FM radio stations. Sandisk thinks simple — get your FM receiver right out of the box.
Ever thought about something important just to forget about it next day? With the msot Sansa models you can record all your thought with the built-in microphone.
Sansa is Sandisk's brand for the wide range of portable media players also known as MP3 players, digital audio players and so on. Such devices are usually smaller than the smallest mobile phones although they can store gigabytes of data inside or, in more convenient way, they can hold thousands of songs that could be played anytime you want in any desired order.
You can copy all songs at once or any number of songs from your computer to your MP3 player or back from the player to the computer, you can even transfer music between computers, because your player acts just like any other external storage device in this case.
But it's not only about music. You can watch, store and transfer movies, photos, audio books and many other digital media with your portable media player.
If you are holding your hand on the pulse of consumer electronics, you probably heard of Apple's iPod series which is generating a lot of buzz nowadays. Well, in general, Sandisk Sansa is like iPod but packed with a load of additional features. Furthermore, Sansa range includes some really interesting models that Apple's have not.