SanDisk Sansa m230 512 MB MP3 Player (Blue)
by SanDisk
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List Price: Our Price: $27.95 You Save: $22.04 (44%) Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours Buy Used: from $14.54 (click here) Category: Network Media Player See more product details |
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Customers in the UK,
Buy this product at amazon.co.uk
for British Pounds
Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of SanDisk Sansa m230 512 MB MP3 Player (Blue)
Customer Review: No problems; significant advantages over iPod
Summary: 5 Stars
The Sandisk Sansa is a small flash-based mp3 player that runs for many hours on a single AAA battery available wherever. It is so easy to use I did not and have not even looked at the instruction manual. The sound quality is really good and the price can't be beat.
As others have noted, the array of mp3 devices is really bewildering. Basically, there is iPod and everything else. Ultimately, this product seems to be the best of the "everything else" category - and there are some significant reasons why I think people are better off with this than with iPods. Firstly, and most importantly for me, the Sandisk player functions as a drag and drop drive into which you can just put your music files and they play right away. There is no proprietary interface such as iTunes required. This is a huge advantage for anyone who does not use or like iTunes, as I do not. Loading and unloading files can be done easily and seamlessly through the regular windows desktop interface. This results in a device that is considerably more useful and robust than iPods which require the use of the stupid and childlike, yet strangely frusterating, iTunes software - one of the biggest problems of which is that you can only use one computer at a time to sync to your music library. This is really not cool. If, however, you want to use a designated piece of software to sync to the Sandisk, you can use musicmatch or a number of others and it works without any of the hassle of iTunes. In fact, with one click, you can sync whatever is playing on your Musicmatch playlist to the player... something that I never really figured out how to do with iTunes. Furthermore, you can easily use the flash memory to hold any other kind of file just like a pen drive.
In the end, I can only attribute the success of iPods to their marketing blitz and to their kind of catchy designs. But these are not really good reasons to buy a music player. I had an iPod for a while before I spilled coffee all over it and I don't miss it one bit. I only wish I had gotten one of these sooner and had given away my iPod to someone who likes them instead of the unfortunate end that it met. I think if you buy one of these you won't regret it. It's not quite as tiny as the iPod shuffle and it does require AAA batteries but it is a much more useful piece of equipment.
Customer Review: Killer Little Device
Summary: 4 Stars
It came in the mail and I was quite surprised at what you get for the money.
This thing is LOUD. I couldn't believe how loud it got using the earbuds that came with it. They sounded pretty good all the way cranked up. If you are wondering, well put your fears to rest, this thing will be heard over any car, subway or airplane ambient noise. You will be blown away.
I have a feeling my battery won't last too long since I will be cranking it up regularly, but whatever it is, the shear volume of this for the price will make you perfectly justified about your purchase!
The FM radio works just fine. I wish it had AM, but it doesn't. I am in a small city so no surprise it picks it locally well.
I didn't know it also had a built-in stopwatch...funny, but handy if you are a jogger I suppose.
The EQ has common presets, but also allows you to tweak a built-in 5 band equalizer. It's great for two reasons... you see the entire five bands on one screen and when you adjust them hot, the thing gets a lot louder and has plenty of punch.
The blue backlight is tasty and has contrast and brightness levels. It is very easy to read (even my bad eyesight) and the readout shows file names, artist, ID3 tags with scrolling titles, multi display of length, bit rate, repeat, shuffle, a bar that shows the timeline of song, elapsed and time left, if fact you can even adjust the amount of time before it auto shuts off. Several Advanced Menu features.
I haven't tested it recording a loud event but the voice recorder worked very well.
When I plugged it into my Windows XP system, it recognized it, but I was unable to drag and drop files directly to it. I was forced to plug it in again and select "Sync Files" using the Windows Media Player (version 10). I had to drag files to a "playlist" and then hit the "Sync" button to Xfer them to the unit. I didn't install any of the software (which might make it easiere) so who knows, but I can tell you at USB 2.0 it takes about 1 1/2 seconds to transfer a 3MB song file...not too bad.
I was excited enough to pass on the good word about this unit and wanted to testify to it being a good price for what you get @ 512 MB + all the features. - Greg Lawrence
Customer Review: I LOVE this player and at this price it is disposable unlike an iPod.
Summary: 5 Stars
=== I LOVE this player!
- Everything is simple and easy to use.
- Feature packed and little time to learn
- Small but not too small for adult sized hands.
- simple and universal USB hi-speed connection
- no software required
- no expensive iTunes to pummel your bank account
- Uses regular AAA battery that lasts forever!
- No battery charger cord to lose or forget!
- no built-in rechargable battery (iPod shuffle) that will die and make the product obsolete
- 3 adults in the family own one of these and love it
- rugged enough to handle multiple drops
=== Dislikes
- 1 Gig would be better for me when on a 7 day trip
- The flexibilty of the AAA battery makes it about twice the thickness I would prefer.
- The included plastic case is only good (because it is required) for using the wristband
- Why no lanyard? It has a connection point for one. Then you could wear it like a necklace.
===Battery
~12 hours for Energizer. I just bought Panasonic brand AAA for a Mexico vacation last week and at ~15+ hours on my 1st Panasonic battery!
Of course you will have to buy some decent headphones. iPod earbuds sound good and can help justify the price for an iPod shuffle or even a iPod nano but I wanted in-ear type for better noise blocking on airplanes and ultimate sound quality. And I wasn't looking to spend $300+ on Shure brand. I bought white Sony in-ear for the bride (paid $39 Circuit City 9/2006) and black Senheisser in-ear for myself. (paid $69 Circuit City 9/2006). Both headphone replacements were major improvements in comfort and sound quality over the Sansa headphones I threw in the trash.
=== To sum it up
But for about $[...] total ($[...] MP3 player,$[...] in-ear headphones) you have a great player you can use regular batteries with, is simple, blocks outside noise and has good sound. A great product because they keep it very simple and easy to use in a somewhat disposable package!
Buy it now! or even better, get the 1 Gig version!
Customer Review: The "512MB" Joke.
Summary: 1 Stars
I would strongly recommened against buying this product.
Some of the many things wrong with it:
The player brags that you can fit 8+ hours of MP3s, or 16+ WMAs. Standard WMAs are larger files than MP3s. They use up significantly more space space in memory and therefore allow fewer hours, not magically double somehow.
I quote 512MB in my review title because the actual file space free is about 485MB.
The player has a tendency to shuffle songs in memory. I don't mean the shuffle feature simply turns itself on, no it simply saves the songs out of the order you specified. Which is okay (though annoying) for some music, but if you are trying to put soundtracks on (for example... the musical Wicked..) it's very annoying when the songs are forcibly in the wrong order. Deleting and readding the files several (3 to 4) times corrects the problem.
The player brags about easy file adding, how you can simply drag and drop to instantly add to the player. Not so much. Instead you have to work through either RealPlayer or Windows Media player (neither of which are very agreeable) to get the files to add. Then once they are added you can't do anything to modify them (as you would be able to if it were truly a simple drag and drop system), so when there are glitches (incorrect order for example) they are impossible to fix without deleting all the files and trying again.
And finally (this is the problem that made me put the player back in it's packaging 6 hours after purchasing it) when I ripped and added music from one of my legally purchased CDs I got an error because apparently I had put protected music on the player, and it could therefore not play it. My reaction, "fine whatever, it doesn't have to be there." However, when I tried to delete the files, the player refused. Insisting that these were protected files that could not possibly be modified or removed. 44.8 MB out of the already minimal "512MB." That is approximately 9% of the advertised capacity of the player.
Save yourself the trouble of returning it, and do not purchase this product. I will be returning mine in the morning.
Customer Review: Complete Review from Pros to Cons to Why I bought it.
Summary: 4 Stars
I will begin with the pros; excellent value, compact design, great sound fidelity, intuitive menus, and ability to play music by album, artist, or a single song.
Now the cons; battery life - 1 AAA Duracell Alkaline battery seems to last for about 12 hours (for me). I have a job where I destroy electronics, then sit at a computer and write reports about it. I listen to my mp3 while doing that for eight hours straight, so I change my battery about every day and a half. There is also this strange 'glitch' where the player locks up (literally). I have to pull the battery to get it out of this state. This is the main reason why I give this player a "4" instead of a "5". Finally, and I realize this is probably nothing to most of you, but why on earth did they decide on the color white for the foam earphone covers? I have had this mp3 player about 4 weeks and the white foam is more gray than white any more.
Why did I buy this mp3 palyer? I bought this mp3 player because I was not sure if I wanted an mp3 player or not. 'Would I really use it', 'Do I really listen to a lot of music', and 'Do I have a large enough music library to justify the cost' are some of the questions that ran through my mind. Generally, I'm the kind of person that buys the things I buy because I either need it, or I will get some amount of pleasure out of owning it. I did not want to spend a lot of money on an mp3 player if I was not going to use it, but I needed to see what the 'mp3 culture' fuss was all about too.
Well, as you just read, I use it for eight hours straight. I do listen to more music than I thought, and it turns out that I had a larger music library than I thought. I bought this model because of its price, so when I got it home and filled it up with my music choices, I found that I could only get 123 songs loaded on it. That gets almost every Primus album, The Wall, and most of Wish You Were Here on it. I still have plenty of Floyd albums, and other Claypool albums, and other artists I want to listen to througout the day, so I will be purchasing another mp3 player with more capacity. I will stick with the SanDisk on the next purchase.