Great upgrade to outdated players with a low sticker price

I just bought this Sandisk Sansa e250 2 GB media player for myself last week after reading up on it, and I have to say, it's exactly the kind of player I'm looking for. Everything I like about mp3 players is here, with nothing I hate (high sticker price, battery issues, bad controls, all sorts of other garbage I'll complain about shortly). Since mine was refurbished, it was incredibly cheap ($30), but the player has been out for a while, so you could pick one up for a fraction of the cost of those by that fruit company.

The Sandisk Sansa media player family

Sandisk came out with this player in 2006, appearing with the same form factor for a few different models - the 2, 4, 6, and 8 gigabyte flash memory-based storage capacity units. I had an old 1 GB Sandisk player that I loved, which was almost enough since I don't need to carry around my whole media collection at once, so the 2 GB model seemed sufficient. More importantly, if I decide to upgrade, this player has a microSD expansion slot, so you can buy the player at the small capacity and wait for the microSD media to come down in price, then quadruple your capacity! A note though - the e250 seems to only be capable of taking a 2 GB microSD card without the Rockbox firmware upgrade, which I will explain below.

The player can play music, video, display photos, and has a radio and voice/radio recorder. It's very intuitive to use, with a thumbwheel to control volume and cycle through songs and a big friendly central button surrounded by 4 navigation direction buttons. I've had no trouble using it, and it plays everything I need (I only use mp3s).

In order to play video or view images, you'll need to use the bundled 'media converter' software to compress down to fit on the 1.8" TFT LCD screen. This is somewhat annoying, but no reason not to consider this player.

My favorite feature is that the player works just like a USB drive if you set the USB mode accordingly. There are two settings, one of which lets you interact with Windows Media Player, but the other letting you plug in the player and have it show up as another drive with a folder. Drag-and-drop interface, no hassles.

What's Included

In the box, you get:

Sandisk Sansa e250 Player
Travel Pouch and Lanyard
Stereo Headphones
Lithium-ion Rechargeable Battery (installed, user-replaceable!)
USB cable
Quick Start Guide
CD-ROM (user's guide, additional flyer inserts)

The Upside

This player, first and foremost, is inexpensive. Retail is now around $80 for the player, but you can find it much cheaper if you look. Once you expand the capacity with the microSD card, you'll have quite a nice little device that has great audio quality and didn't tap into your savings. Invest in good headphones with what you saved, and you'll be quite happy indeed.

The player is flash-based, not hard-drive based like older Ipods. This means that you can shake it all you want with no fear of it skipping or being damaged. It also means low power consumption, which results in a 20-hour battery life in most situations (predominantly audio playback).

The player is extremely small and stylish - 1.7 x 3.5 x 0.5 inches, weighing in at 2.6 ounces. It fits quite comfortable in your pocket, even with the carrying case.

The firmware is upgradeable, and there is open-source software out there with some VERY cool features. Check out the Rockbox open-source firmware at (www.rockbox.org) to see what this thing can do, but let me tell you, it can open up whole new worlds for this player. I've installed it, and it works great - I'll even put a little section with its features at the bottom of this review. If you choose not to install a third-party operating system, Sandisk has very user-friendly automatic firmware updaters on their website which add a more comprehensive battery meter and a few other features, so at least go for that and check in periodically.

The controls are easy to use, and allow a few nice features, such as one-touch recording of radio broadcasts and quick playlist generation. You can rate your songs and import playlists from Windows Media Player, scroll through and select songs by artist and album, and it's easy to understand without a lot of fluffy menus.

The player recognizes mp3, WMA, and WMA-DRM (plays-for-sure) files. With the rockbox upgrade it will do more, but this is a good start. It also recognizes your ID3 tags, so you won't have to look at just the file names. It can play MPEG-4, WMV, and DivX video files, which look pretty good on the screen even at medium brightness settings.

The sound quality is very good. I don't detect any distortion or skipping, though I don't know why this would happen on modern flash players in the first place.

One of my favorite features is that the battery, although proprietary and rechargeable, is user replaceable. This means that, unlike on the Ipod, when the battery does die, you can just get another one, unscrew the back, and pop it in. Go to (www.batteries.com) or check Ebay to pick one up for 10 bucks, instead of paying $100 to Apple to fix your bricked IPod.

The frame and screen are very durable. The player claims to be made of something called 'liquidmetal', which is very scratch-resistant. So far I agree - I haven't mangled the thing in my pocket, even without a case. As long as it holds up for a few years, I'll be happy, but the build quality is solid on this guy.

The Downside

The player is fairly stripped down, so the song rating system doesn't seem to do much and the playlist settings are strange. I don't see custom sound settings anywhere beyond swapping through a few preset settings such as 'jazz', 'rock', etc, and the little equalizer display refreshes so slowly it's completely useless. The menus are sparse, but I can't think of what they might be missing.

The data transfer cable prevents you from listening to music while you are downloading or charging. There are two solutions to this, one of which being much easier than the other. Solution 1: buy an AC adapter instead of the USB data/charge cable. This won't force the player into data mode, and you can listen while you charge. Solution 2: the USB plug going to your PC has 4 contact points. Put a small piece of paper over the middle two when you just want to charge the device without transferring data, and this will allow you to continue listening to music. This is harmless, free, and easy.

The microSD expansion slot has some issues. If you use an expansion card, the player will refresh its database when you turn it on, wasting at least 30 seconds. Also, with the Sandisk firmware, you can only use up to a 2 GB microSD card. You'll need the rockbox firmware to go up to a 6 GB expansion card.

The data transfer cable is Sandisk proprietary, which is one more thing to carry around. My old Sandisk player took a standard USB A-B cable, same as for my digital camera, portable hard drive, and all sorts of other stuff. It would have been nice if this followed the same pattern.

Rockbox

Rockbox is an open-source firmware upgrade that people have been developing for many different media player formats. For the sansa series, there are some very cool enhancements you get, and a few downsides. Worst downsides - lower battery life, and no USB data support (you keep both operating systems on there and have to hit a few buttons to switch back and upload new media).

But here are the upsides:

5-band fully-parametric customizable equalizer
New skins and user interfaces
Better (more accurate) battery meter
More media type support - FLAC, WAV, AAC, AIFF, all sorts of stuff
Gapless playback
Gameboy emulator
Doom emulator
Real time clock
High-capacity microSD card support
Constantly improved (in later versions for other players, for example, Rockbox improved battery life over original firmware)

As this open source jukebox software comes along, I'm sure other great features will come about. This player is one of the many that can support it, and I'm excited that I have so many nice bonus features if I want them.

Overall

This player, in its normal form, has all that I'm looking for in a media player. It has a 20 hour battery life, is small and light, durable, great sound quality, easy to use, and works as a USB drive if you set it up as such so you can transfer songs on AND OFF (unlike IPod) the player with ease. With the optional Rockbox upgrade, you gain even more features, perhaps a ridiculous quantity of them in fact, with a battery life penalty.

Any flaws in the player can be worked around, such as the USB charging-while-playing debacle. And with the price of microSD cards coming down significantly and constantly, this player can be expanded from 2 GB to 8 GB for around $50 (at the time of this review). I'd say this is well within my price range for silly consumer electronics - $30-$80 for the player, $50 for an upgrade to get 4x the capacity at a later date. Get this player!