While it is quite common knowledge that Apple’s insanely popular iPod line is the number one music player, it is a lesser known fact that SanDisk is the solid number two provider of music players. The SanDisk Corporation is better known for their flash memory, and originally, they looked upon these players simply as a vehicle to sell more of their flash memory chips. While Microsoft struggles to create their “MiPod” player, are they simply ignoring an already available Windows based alternative?
Last year, the Sansa e100 line of players was basic, and functional, and got the job done of playing tunes. However, they didn’t quite have the style of the iconic iPod. With a monochrome screen, a cheap plastic exterior and no included software, they were well, utilitarian. Kind of like an economy class rental car; it gets you there but no one is turning their head to see you.
What a difference a year makes. Introduced at the Consumer Electronics Show in January 2006, the e200 series of players are designed to take your entire multimedia to the next level. There is also a less expensive c100 series, with fewer features. With a color screen, and large memory capacities of 2 GB, 4 GB and 6 GB (currently the largest capacity flash player on the market), they clearly had the upper end of the flash player market, including the iPod Nano, in their sights. Let’s see how the e200 performs.
What’s In the Box?
The Sansa e200 ships with the following:
- Sansa e200 player with 2 GB (e240), 4 GB (e260), or 6 GB (e280) of memory
- Earbuds
- USB cable
- Pouch
- Quick start guide
- Lanyard
- Rhapsody trial
The pouch is best suited to storing the Sansa in the bottom of a laptop case or backpack. You can’t get to any of the controls, or see the screen while it is in the pouch; it really can’t function as a regular case. Also, very few of us use the included lanyard, and there is no way to wear the Sansa on a belt, or workout armband. Personally, I would rather see a case with a belt clip included rather than the pouch and the lanyard that is included. Of course, this will be remedied by most users with optional accessories.
Construction & Controls
The Sansa e200 is a smartly designed player, with a nice compact form factor. It features a shiny plastic front, and a metal back. The black plastic is fingerprint prone, but more durable and scratch resistant than its competition. The metal on the back is the Liquidmetal that SanDisk has used with its Cruzer Titanium USB drives, which are nearly indestructible. This creates a very durable back, that is still lightweight, but substantial.
The front features an LCD screen that measures a 1.8 inches diagonally. The screen is very readable, when it is backlit. The internal light goes off to conserve power, so unless in direct sunlight, the screen cannot be read at all. If you like to see the artist’s names as you listen to music, you’ll have to be relighting the back light with each new song which will shorten the battery life.
I’ll now describe the player’s controls, along each surface. The top has the mini headphone jack, the microphone and the hold button. The left side’s only button starts the recording. The right side features a memory slot for a microSD card. The bottom is the interface for the proprietary Sansa connector (it is the same as the previous e100 so the same accessories will work). This brings us to the front, which houses the rest of the controls. There is an indented scroll wheel which surrounds a center button. Around the scroll wheel are four buttons like the directions on a compass: play to the north, forward is east, rewind is west, and list is south. On the lower left hand corner is a button marked menu that also doubles as the power button when held down.
For the most part, the controls are well laid out, and rather intuitive. I figured most of it out without even reading the manual once I figured out where the power button was. The entire player feels high end, except for the scroll wheel that even though indented should roll a little more smoothly. Its clackety-clack just doesn’t seem to fit with the rest of the Sansa device. Still, it was great for navigating one track at a time, and much easier to use that the thumb slide that the Creative players use for moving around. The scroll wheel lights up blue when used which is a neat, although gimmicky, touch for the younger crowd. The center button is plenty large, but the four surrounding buttons could be a little larger. It doesn’t help that the scroll wheel is raised, making it slightly harder to depress these buttons. With practice it can be done by feel alone, but folks with larger hands should try this before purchasing.
Overall, this is one of the better interfaces on a player, and a few nitpicks aside, I found it real simple to navigate the well laid out menu structure. I never got lost, or couldn’t find the adjustment I was looking for. SanDisk should definitely keep this type of interface for their future players as it is leaps ahead of their Windows based competitors.
Included Software
The Sansa e200, when plugged into a USB port on a Windows machine, appears as a mass storage device. This makes it a matter of dragging and dropping the music files onto the player. This is my preferred method for populating my player’s memory with music. The Sansa then organizes the tracks by artist, album, and genre. A single playlist, the so called “go list,” can be built on the fly from the player.
For users that would rather use a software player to upload their music tracks, Windows Media player can interface with the Sansa e200. Select the tracks and synchronize. Even the star ratings for the tracks will get uploaded, and the Sansa can play only the highest ranked tracks if you so desire.
Notice that none of the above involves any special software for the Sansa. The software is for uploading video and images, not for music. The pictures need to be converted to JPEG’s that will fit on the screen. The video has to be converted to Quicktime format (ironically an Apple video format), as this is the only video format that is native to the Sansa. The conversion process was quick, and seamless. Simply find the file, and the software converts it and uploads it to the e200. When converting MPEG video, with an Athlon 64 3800+, the whole process took about 1 second per MB of video. I’m sure that newer processors will even do it more swiftly.
Music
The Sansa e200 plays only the essential types of music files: MP3, WMA, and DRM-WMA. The last format makes it compatible with monthly “all you can eat” music plans such as Rhapsody and Napster. It played all the files I uploaded to it, both constant and variable bit rate formats, ranging from 128 to 256 kbps. As the Sansa is at home with the two most common music formats outside of Apple’s AAC (which only the iPod line plays), this is more than adequate for the vast majority of users out there.
When playing a song, the album art is displayed if the folder contains it. The artist, track name, and album name are displayed as well. The length of the track and a progress bar are at the bottom of the screen. Pressing the center button toggles to a moving equalizer, the full screen album art, and the next song. Unfortunately, there is no display for the type of file, and the bit rate it is encoded at, but this is likely too hard core for most anyway. This is all laid out well, and very readable on the color screen.
Audio Quality & Adjustments
The audio quality of the Sansa e200 is solid. Gone are the WOW, focus and spatializer settings of the e100 series. In its place is just solid, nonadjustable sound.
It’s not truly nonadjustable, but minimally adjustable is more accurate. The volume can be toggled between normal and high. For use in the car through a cassette adaptor, the high setting worked best, and I left it there. There are a series on graphics equalizer presets such as rock, classical, hip hop, etc. Unfortunately for the control freaks, there is no custom equalizer, even though the previous e100’s and the less expensive c100 has this feature. Somewhere along the line it got lost. Using the preset equalizers, I found that they were way too strong. Rock, for example, boosted the bass and top to the point that the mids sounded very weak. The other settings had too heavy a hand as well. I figured out that normal, also known as no equalizer, sounded best. The equalizer settings can be applied while the music is playing so that you can see if it is to your liking.
One mildly annoying feature is that the volume defaults to 50% when the player is powered off. For those of us that listen mostly in the car, this means that we have to dial it back up every time we start it again. It is a safety feature to prevent deafness, but annoying nonetheless for those that will use this responsibly anyway.
Images
With such a bright and colorful LCD screen, it is well suited to image display. While small, it does suffice to display series of vacation photos. It is better than looking at them on the screen of a digital camera which is how my coworkers often show them to me. The conversion process is quick, and then the images are uploaded to the Sansa. There is a slideshow mode, but it is activated by the center control, and then plays automatically. It’s a great way to show off the latest vacation photos, and quite convenient. Since the iPod Photo, image displaying has become a standard feature of high end players.
The e200 supports the following image formats: JPEG, TIFF, PNG, BMP and GIF which should cover all the pictures likely to be encountered. If the image is something more obscure, you could always convert it to one of the above formats in an imaging program anyway.
Video
Ok, let’s be reasonable here. Is anyone going to want to watch a full length film on a screen under two inches? I doubt it, and if they do, they’ll need to get their eyes, and head examined. That said, I must admit that it is nice to have this as a feature for shorter material, such as a movie trailer.
The converter can make the following formats into Quicktime files that the e200 series can play them:
- AVI
- MPEG 1
- MPEG 2
- MPG
- MPE
- VOB
- MPEG 4
- DAT
- AST
- Quicktime
- MOV
- WMV
The resulting video runs smoothly, with the audio intact. It is a refined process that this all is accomplished without any hiccups from the player, or the software.
Battery Life & Power Issues
The Sansa has one huge advantage over the iPod line- the battery is replaceable. The Sansa is powered by a lithium ion cell that allows it to maintain its sleek lines. Like any other battery using lithium ion chemistry, in a few years it will have to be replaced. It is designed to be performed by the end user, by removing four screws on the back of the player. This is not exactly snap in easy, and I wouldn’t recommend it mid-flight, but the end user is given the option of changing their own battery which is the way all players should be, but too often aren’t.
The unit is charged via its USB cable. There are pros and cons to this approach. Positively, there is no bulky charger, and while uploading media, the Sansa is being recharged. On the downside, for those of us that don’t bring our notebook on vacation, it may be a challenge to keep it charged. Also, some folks like to plug their player, at a party or at work, plugged into the wall all day to listen to music. You can’t do this at all. Even with the USB cable plugged in, the player will charge, but it can’t play music simultaneously. This will disappoint some users.
Not that you’ll run out of battery life too soon. The lithium ion cell is rated for 20 hours of battery power. In my testing, I got around 16 hours of battery life between charging sessions.
Additional Features
The e200 includes an FM radio. This is useful for times that you want to take a break from the prerecorded music. It has presets, and worked fine. It’s not a must have feature for me, but for iPod faithful to have this feature they need additional accessories so factor this into your decision. The player can also record off of the radio if you’re so inclined.
The Sansa has a slot for removable memory. True, it’s of the teeny, obscure microSD flavor, but it does give the option of adding another gig of memory. Reportedly, only music can be uploaded to the card, and not images or video. This represents another advantage over the iPod line which does not accept any flash cards to expand the memory.
The e200 can also be used for voice recording. The audio gets saved as a WAV file, which is not the most compact. This is adequate for quick voice memos, but dedicated hardware is better for recording a full lecture, for example. Again, the iPod line needs additional accessories for recording, and the Sansa has this thrown in.
Conclusion
The two to four gigabyte capacity segment has traditionally been a very competitive market segment for media players. This was previously dominated by micro hard drive based players. With cheaper flash memory, now has relegated hard drives to only the largest capacity players. The advantage of no moving parts for better battery life and durability clearly are worth pursuing. Combine that with the sleek lines that flash memory and a lithium ion cell offer, and we can see why these are selling well. I think we will not see new media players introduced based on hard drives in the 2 to 6 GB memory capacity segment.
With memory capacities of 2, 4 and 6 GB, this is the “sweet spot” for player capacities currently. They have more than enough room for larger music collections, and images as well. The Sansa e200 deserves its current role as the dominant non-iPod player. Windows users desiring a fashionable, easy to use player, with a color screen will be well served by the current Sansa e200 lineup.
–Jonas
