SanDisk Sansa e260

SanDisk is more popular in our side of the world for memory cards that most of the budget conscious buyers avoid in favor of cheaper (and often fake) brands, but in the other parts of the world, their Sansa series of MP3 players have been getting a lot of attention and are more widely appreciated than Creative’s Zens. That makes the Sansa players the second most popular in the world, coming in right after the iPod.

Mostly making low-capacity players such as 512MB and 1GB models, the new e200 series sport a color display and higher capacities such as 2GB, 4GB, 6GB and 8GB, namely e250, e260, e270 and e280.

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The e200 series are direct competitors to the iPod Nano, but the first thing anyone will spot is that it’s almost twice as thick, even though its roughly the same height and width. Those with eyes on the Nano will need a serious amount of feature benefit from the Sansa if they are to be impressed.

The rear of the player needs a special mention because its made out of a special Titanium alloy by Liquidmetal Technologies that’s supposed to be scratch resistant, but the piece we received already had a pretty large scar on the back. Interestingly, all attempts at trying to create our own scars failed.
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The control scheme of the Sansa e200 series players is around about the same as the Nano. It has a wheel that rotates around one main center “ok” button and has four buttons around for directional navigation as well as playback action (i.e. play/pause, forward, rewind, etc.). The wheel is not a touch-sensitive wheel like the one on the iPods, but a real wheel that physically rotates. It also glows blue when you use it, which looks cool. The buttons around the wheel are a little small and may be uncomfortable to operate, requiring ’nail-typing’ most of the time.

There is also a power button on the lower left which doubles up as a main menu button—something I think will take a bit of getting used to after accidentally shutting down the player instead of going to the menu.

The 1.8" display is a lot larger than the Nano. When viewed in landscape mode, it is a proper 4:3 aspect screen (208x160 or 160x208 vertical). The screen is pretty bright and although it looks a little washed out at max brightness, you’ll be comfortable at even a 50% level.

The user interface is a rotating wheel of options (for which you use the rotating wheel on the player), which seems quite fancy and picturesque when compared to the iPod’s plain vanilla ‘simple’ text-based UI, but when clicked it leads the same boring list of text that the iPod has. The spinning icons may seem a little different at first look, but when you get to the list, you’re in familiar territory once again.
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The e200 series play back MP3 and WMA files. The players are also PlaysForSure compatible, so if you’re into Napster and Rhapsody and other DRM things like that, you can play those tunes on the Sansa too. One of the best part about the Sansa e200 series is that the players are all USB Mass Storage compliant so you just hook them up and drag and drop music and photos without using any proprietary software like iTunes or Zune Marketplace. I absolutely loved this about the e260. However, the cable cable has a proprietary connector at the player’s end, not a standard mini-USB like some other players have. The player also recharges through the same cable.

While drag-and-drop rules for music and photos, videos will need to be converted to a Sansa-compatible format using the provided Sansa Media Converter software. The software is very easy to use and takes only two steps to convert any video down to the required size and format. It supports QuickTime MOV, AVI, MPG, WMV and even DVD VOB files. The native format is also .MOV, but you can’t play back any MOV on it. The right formatted files are MJPEG compressed MOVs at 160x208 resolution and 15fps, which is fixed and cannot be changed. Also, a 60mb VCD-quality MOV got compressed down to 35mb, making the ‘compression’ a little questionable. I took the HD 720p trailer for 300 and the converter kicked the file out as hard as King Leonidas kicks that black guy, screaming “This Is Sansa!” Aaarggh.

Playback quality of the Sansa is excellent. It sounds as good as the iPod and the Creative Zens. The ‘normal’ equalizer setting lacks the required punch, but other ones such as ‘Rock’ give better output. Unfortunately, there is no custom equalizer option to let you tweak the sound manually. The provided headphones are a whole lot more comfortable to wear than the old iPod headphones, but not as good as the new ones that come with the iPods now. The earphones deliver crisp highs and very decent lows, but you will obviously be better off using nice in-ear phones like the Fontopias for stomp bass.

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The Sansa also has an FM radio tuner which is pretty much a standard feature of any media player that isn’t from Apple these days. Unlike phones, the e260 doesn’t require you to plug in the headphones to act as an antenna, although it’s quite interesting to know what you’d do with no headphones plugged into the device. Reception was strong with top-notch quality coming in even deeper areas of the office. FM can be also be recorded on the fly, and so can voice, but they go in WAV format only.

Other than the internal capacity of the e200 series (2GB to 8GB), there is also a microSD/TransFlash slot on the Sansa if you ever feel like you’re going to run out of space. This instantly bring ups the idea of purchasing a cheaper 2GB Sansa and then upgrading the capacity with a 2GB microSD card. Alternatively you can pick up the new, highest capacity e280 and take the total space up to 10GB. But I don’t see a lot of people doing this, at least in India. It may have been a better idea to remove the slot and bring down the cost, and perhaps make the device a little slimmer while they’re at it.

The battery life of the Sansa e260 is rated at around 20 hours. We tested the player with a combination of things including music playback, video playback, photo viewing and FM radio playback, during which the battery lasted for well over 12-13 hours. Another plus point of the Sansa is that the Li-Ion battery is user-replacable. You can buy the batteries separately and put them in if the original ones get messed up.

The cost of the e250 (2GB) is around Rs. 7,500, e260 (4GB) is around Rs. 10,000 and the e270 (6GB) is around Rs. 12,000. When put right next to the Nano’s Rs. 9,800 (2GB) and Rs. 13,200 (4GB), the Sansa offers a lot more value for money. Not only is it cheaper than the iPod, it also has FM, video playback and a larger screen. The only problem I can see with the Sansa is that… it’s not an iPod.