SanDisk Sansa e260 4 GB MP3 Player with MicroSD Expansion Slot (Black
by SanDisk
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Our Price: $259.96 Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $52.99 (click here) Category: Network Media Player See more product details |
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Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of SanDisk Sansa e260 4 GB MP3 Player with MicroSD Expansion Slot (Black
Customer Review: Useless if you travel without a laptop to charge the player
Summary: 1 Stars
I just bought a SanDisk Sansa e270, and deeply regret the purchase. I need a travel charger and a spare battery, but you don't sell either, and will not tell me what other chargers, if any are compatible with the e270. Your technical support representative's answers are absolutely useless - I have cut and pasted my questions and his responses below. Given the non-existent customer support, I will not buy another SanDisk product again.
Your Question/Problem: I want to use the Sansa e270 when I travel, but won't be carrying a laptop. How do I charge the battery since you don't sell a travel charger? Can I use the IPod Nano/mini charger brick and plug the Sansa USB into it? If not, what can I use.
Also, I want to buy a spare battery since it is user replaceable, but you don't sell it either. Where do I buy one?
SanDisk Response: (06/20/2006 08:09)
Thank you for contacting SanDisk Technical Support.
I understand how inconvenience the issue may be causing you.
As of now there is no available wallcharger and spare battery for the Sansa e200 series. Also we do not recommend that you use the charger of the ipod player, considering that is not a product of SanDisk.
If you have any further questions, please feel free to reply to this e-mail.
Thank you for choosing SanDisk.
Have a nice day!
Sincerely,
Michael Louie I.
SanDisk Technical Support
Your Response: (06/21/2006 08:03) My trips typically last 2-4 weeks, so I really do need to charge. Since you do not sell chargers and batteries, and recommend not using non-SanDisk chargers, that makes my SanDisk unusable after the charge runs out.
The only alternative is to use the IPod charger - please tell me what the correct voltage, amperage, and polarity is to charge the Sansa e270. I am willing to use a non-SanDisk product even if it means voiding the warranty. Otherwise I have wasted almost $300. And when will you start selling spare batteries, since one of the reasons I bought the Sansa was because SanDisk advertised it had a replaceable battery - although this may be true in theory, it is not true if you don't sell one!
SanDisk Response: (06/21/2006 08:03)
Thank you for contacting SanDisk Technical Support.
I understand how inconvenience the issue may be causing you.
The ampherage, polarity and voltage are all proprietary information that we are unable to release at this time.
You may try to do a search on a compatible charger for the Sansa e200 series player. However we do not guarantee that anything will work with it until we put a charger on the market. But we have no information when it will be out.
If you have any further questions, please feel free to reply to this e-mail.
Thank you for choosing SanDisk.
Have a nice day!
Sincerely,
Michael Louie I.
SanDisk Technical Support
Customer Review: mark my words: THIS THING IS [...]
Summary: 1 Stars
I recently bought this sansa at Best Buy, and I very much regret the purchase. I was just goint to Best Buy because I was looking into buying some sort of MP3 player (not necessarily an ipod because they are a lot more expensive than other brands) to hold about 4 GB of music. When telling this to one of the employees, she pretty much talked me into buying a Sansa e260. She definitely had very good reasons for getting a sansa over an ipod nanos: sansa's are a lot cheaper for the same amount of storage capacity, sansa's are more durable than nanos, sansa's have an FM tuner included and nanos don't...the list goes on and on. A big deal for getting an mp3 player was being able to charge it on the go because I'm going on a lot of trips this year and I'm not always gonna have access to a computer. Even though Sandisk does not make a charger specifically made for the Sansa, the employee at Best buy assured me that I could buy a Griffin brand wall charger made for an ipod and it would charge it. I guess I made a mistake on my part howeve because I bought the sansa with the wall charger in the beginning of July, right before leaving on vacation. After charging the sansa right when I got it, it stayed charged all week (to avoid having to charge it all the time, I set the backlight on dim and had it turn off after 5 seconds) into my vacation. After a couple days of long car rides, my sansa needed to be charged so I plugged it in correctly to my wall charger and left it to charge overnight. Unfortunately, nothing happened and my mp3 died. I coulnd't get it to turn on or do anything the rest of the trip. I even went to walmart during my vacation to try a new charger to see if it was just the charger but it failed to charge with it. This is when I knew that this thing was a piece of crap and I was disappointed because I had no music for the rest of my vacation.
Pros -
*long battery charge if you don't always leave the backlight on
*FM tuner
*good sound when using good ear phones (more about that in the cons)
*easy to load music onto using my already organized music library on window's media player
*very durable and fit well in my hand
*easy to get around (I liked how all of the menus were organized)
Cons -
*wouldn't charge with a wall charger!!! (although, when reading some of the reviews on here, I guess a wall charger worked for them)
*adding songs to the "Go List" is annoying because you have to play each song you want to add individually
*the ear phones that come with them have horrible sound and don't fit in my ears. Also, the little foam things that cover the ear phones fall off so easily.
It's too bad though because I really liked my sansa and how it worked overall. I'm getting an ipod nano soon though because I'm done dealing with crap. Now I know why ipods are more expensive. It's also nice how you actually can find all of the accessories you need for ipod anywhere.
Customer Review: Definitely A Worthy iPod Nano Competitor
Summary: 4 Stars
I had been using an iRiver h10 for a little under a year and it died a horrible firmware death that was unrepairable, so I got this unit as its replacement.
Let's clear up one thing up front: THIS UNIT DOES NOT SUPPORT MP3's ABOVE 256KBPS. SanDisk does not acknowledge this or post this as a part of the product, but their tech support will admit it if you call them about it. The 256kbps cap isn't asuggestion -- the unit will choke and stutter badly on anything higher bitrate. So just know that ahead of time that you'll have to convert your MP3's down to 256kbps at least before you can use them on it, and plan accoridngly. For me it was an annoying oversight (especially since my old iRiver H10 happily played 320kbps files), but not a really big deal because with a half-hour of work I could convert my 320kbps files down to 256kbps and transfer them over for use.
All that aside, it's a great little player with a very nice display for its size and value. The sound is good, controls and UI are solid, and the battery life is fanatstic (2 more hours batt. life than a Nano). Its 4GB of storage is a solid capacity and value.
The playlist plays through a number randomize function, which is a GOOD thing. Each song is assigned a number, and when a randome number is chosen the corresponding song plays. This is nice for one reason -- if you change the contents of the drive while it's paused, the device won't choke when it tries to resume a file that's no longer there. Instead it will play whatever file has that same number now, or skip ahead to a new number if that number simply no longer exists. It's a very small thing in the grand scheme of things, but a big annoyance that it prevents and I've seen other players not be abel to handle such a simple scenario.
One other downside I found was the media conversion tool to import photos and video (since this unit plays video). On the video side it unfortunately converts to QuickTime, which is IMHO an absolutely terrible video format that results in bloated movie size on the device (80 MB video files become ~160 MB after conversion). However it converted over my little DivX movies with almost no hitch. And the screen is small for video, but not entirely unwatchable. I personally still find it more novelty than useful though, but it deifnitely works as well as it can.
On top of it all, it also offers MicroSD expansion, and a rather nice FM Tuner -- neither of which an iPod can boast.
So if you don't want to be an iSheep, and you don't need iTunes or similar music management software to help manage your device and are happy with Windows Explorer copy-n-paste to move your media on, this really is a very nice little player for its price. I have to say I enjoy it a lot and would definitely recommend it, especially to anyone specifically trying to avoid Apple's iPod empire. IMHO it not only matches them, but beats them in many areas.
Customer Review: Why I'm glad I didn't get a Nano.....
Summary: 5 Stars
I bought this for my boyfriend for Christmas. I decided to put a few songs he likes along with a video or two on it before I wrapped it up for him. I was expecting it to be an alright MP3 player because of the reviews I had read, but I never expected it to hold a light to any of the Apple's creations.
I took it out of the box expecting to plug it in and need the program on the cd to add music to it... because that is how the other top mp3 players work. Well, it didn't need any program installations. I plugged it into my computer and it was simply drag and drop music from my music folder to the Sansa music folder. I was very impressed with this feature. I did, however, have to install the video converter program (which comes with it) to my computer in order to put videos or pictures on my comp.... BUT this was also a very simple program to use.
The look of the Sansa also impressed me. Though it's a little thicker than a nano, it's still very small... and I love the blue light around the turn wheel. The video has vivid color and looks GREAT~!
I'm very impressed with the FM radio and the voice recorder that it came with as well because I know my boyfriend ALWAYS likes to listen to the Kentucky basketball games and he's not always around a radio (I didn't try either out-- I'm just impressed it has them)... the iPod doesn't have a radio or voice recorder.
I've owned three different music players: the 30gb Ipod Video, the 4gb first gen Ipod Nano, and *currently* the Pioneer Inno which is also an XM player. I never thought I'd say I like an MP3 player better than either of my Ipods. I never thought I'd experience one that could hold a light to either of my ipods but this one does. &for the price... I believe it may actually surpass the new Nanos (though I've not tried out a 3rd gen one).
I hate for this to be a compare/contrast review... but I know what sort of reviews I was looking for whenever I was in the market to buy an MP3 player. In my opinion I think the Sansa is easier to use than the Ipod, has just as good color with the video as the iPod, runs/loads things a little faster than my iPod did, and has more features than the Ipod. I'd love to be able to compare it to the Zune (because that's another one I was considering), but I've never experienced one of those. In comparison with the Ipod... I believe this one should win-- hands down.
The only negative I can see-- so far-- is it's lack of accessories on the market. We all know the Ipod has tons of items we can buy to use with it. Though I did buy an FM modulator for the Sansa... which is really the only accessory I ever use with any MP3 player (and I figure the only one my b/f will ever use). I don't know. I love this little thing and now I kinda wish I would have asked for one of these instead of a new Nano for Christmas...
Customer Review: Great inexpensive music player
Summary: 4 Stars
I got this for a GF of mine who had a super outdated MP3 player. She isn't very computer literate - and I wanted to get her something with more current music on it. I went through forums/reviews and opted to get this one - only b/c it was one of the most inexpensive video players.
The ear bud covers suck! They're easily ripped.
Wish this came with a Wall charger (she doesn't have access to a computer).
Couple of things...
I think my biggest mistake was trying to load music on this with my Mac - it's really not mac friendly, it completed screwed up the system, and I ended up formatting it on my PC to redo - only to find that a mysterious 2GB of data was on there - yet the system had no files. I ended up using disk utility (MAC) to complete wipe the drive and then start over on my PC.
I converted all the songs I liked off my itunes into MP3 (I created a playlist first in itunes, then right click and hit the "Create MP3 Files" - then drag and dropped it onto an external thumb drive with all the music I wanted on it. (90% of my music is in m4a format). DO NOT BUY SOFTWARE TO CONVERT SONGS TO MP3 - itunes is FREE! (Took me forever to figure this out).
Once I had all the music I wanted, I dumped them onto my PC. From there I created the playlists I wanted - Once everything was organized in Windows Media Player, I plugged in the sansa.
I then put everything onto the "sync box" and let it go.
VIDEOS:
Download youtube videos (find a free service online) - (make sure it's an avi file) - seems like that's the easiest for the sansa video converter to rip. Unfortunately, the box didn't have the SANSA disk in there - so i googled the sansa video converter and downloaded it off the net (the link in the instruction manual was no longer active). I then imported the .avi file through the converter, and put the video on the sansa - it's actually really easy once you know what file format you need to get the converter to work - I tried the mpeg but it would spin and about 52% in the software would just stall.
My friend LOVED THIS! The dial makes it easy to flip through the music library. The buttons are big enough for ease of use (that was one of my huge decision factors on this vs. the nano). The video quality is awesome.
I ended up getting a USB wall adapter so that she could charge the sansa w/o relying on her work computer. $4 more seems like a great addon to this product.
I would have given this a 5 if it wasn't such a pain to get the music on. I almost sent this back to Amazon as a defective unit until I wiped the system with my mac. It took a bit of troubleshooting but in the end, this turned out to be a great gift - and a fun learning experience for me on a PC friendly music player.