So, Sandisk seem to be developing a pretty good record of doing things right with their latest series of MP3 players, especially given their competition in the things-that-aren't-iPods department. The Express is the newest member of their Sansa family, at the "low end" of the spectrum. The Express, then, is often regarded as residing in the same class of subcompact flash based player such as the iPod Shuffle and Creative Zen Stone. Unlike the above, however, the Express has a display and feature-wise is more of a competitor to the iPod Nano instead of the Shuffle - Though it kicks both of Apple's mini-players squarely in the balls on more than one front.

To begin with, the Express has a form factor rather like a fat USB flash drive. It's about as wide as another notable SanDisk widget: The Cruzer Micro. About two thirds again thicker, and counting the USB connector maybe a third of an inch longer. The face is a shiny, dusky silver. It looks sort of like hematite. Beneath it hides a four-plus-one line OLED display that's invisible in normal indoor lighting unless it's on, though in bright light you can see through the semisilvered face of the player to the empty screen. The display is primarily blue, but the top line is a slightly greenish orange.

The appeal of the Express is what lurks beneath the cap on the left end of the player: A USB connector, built right in. No cable required. On the opposite end is a MicroSD slot, completing the Express' trio of features that put it head-and-shoulders above the other players in its supposed "class."

So the Express is, basically, a flash drive that can play your MP3's as well as store them. With the MicroSD slot it's got expandable storage and is therefore reasonably future proof. Even if the stock gig of internal storage space and an attached two gig card outstrip your appetite for a day's worth of music, somebody bearing a collection MicroSD cards could carry around a functionally infinite amount of music. Figure that a MicroSD card is about the same size as the silver "confirm" button in the center of the Express' button cluster and it's easy to imagine how someone armed with, say, a small salt shaker full of the things could be packing the entire musical output of the Grateful Dead twice over along with a copy of the Library of Congress in the extra space. MicroSD cards are commodity items anymore; Newegg will happily sell you brand name ones, 2 gigs for 23 dollars or so.

There was an age, many moons ago, when memory cards were exotic unobtainum and all players had (usually RAM based) storage built in. Those that were zooty enough to have card slot besides could either play from the card if it was inserted or from internal memory if it wasn't, but not both. The Express is hindered by none of this tomfoolery; When powered on it catalogs what's on the card as well as in internal memory, and largely treats the who separate memory sources as a unified whole. If you take the card out while the Express is playing from of it, it just stops in its tracks and throws you back to the main menu. Songs in the main memory will play normally until you give the card back. The player can actually detect a hot-swap of a memory card, and will display a message indicating its refreshing its database and suggesting you don't remove the card. You don't even have to reboot the player - it's all handled very well.

There are caveats. The Express certainly is capable of just acting like a USB Mass Storage device, just like any other USB flash drive or little portable hard drive or what have you. That's not its default behavior, though. If you plug the Express into a Windows machine that has a recent flavor of Windows Media Player (versions 10, 11, and upwards) it'll get recognized as a so-called "MTP" device instead (Music Transfer Protocol). In MTP mode, songs must be copied to the player with an MTP compliant program. Windows Media Player is such a program, of course, as is Apple's iTunes (sort of) and Nullsoft's Winamp (a much better alternative). Copying in MTP mode is pretty much automated and the player'll fill its internal memory first and then your card (if you have one). Zootier MTP programs can fill your player automatically with random tracks, or swap in albums you haven't listened to in a while, or what have you. It's not my bag, but it has its merits. It's noteworthy that the only way to move "protected" DRM laced tracks from online music services to the player is via MTP mode. Well, you can move the files themselves via Mass Storage (MSC) mode, but they won't play. Also, tracks copied to the player via MTP mode can't be copied off via MSC and vise versa (and DRM'ed tracks can't be copied off at all).

If you plug the Express into something that doesn't support MTP mode it'll fall back on MSC mode instead. Thusly, you can use the player with Linux, Mac OS, older versions of Windows (as long as they're USB compliant) and so forth without having to noodle about with MTP software. Unlike larger Sandisk players, there's no way to force the express to always use one or the other: It'll do MTP if it can, and MSC if it can't. If you want to use the player as general purpose data storage as well as music you'll have to force your copy of Windows to use MSC mode all the time, which is simple enough but not documented anywhere official. In device manager, just find the Express and reload its drivers. Instead of searching, click through to "I will select from a list" and pick "USB Mass Storage Device," which will helpfully be right there in the dialog box waiting for you without having to search for it. Bing, zot, your machine will recognize your Express (or any Express) as two drive letters: One for the internal memory, and another for the MicroSD slot. You don't even have to reboot, but you will have to do it each computer you plan to use the Express with. (The change back, incidentally, is just as simple. Instead of USB Mass Storage, select MTP Device.) When it's plugged into a PC the player shows one of two animated status widgets (one for MTP and one for MSC mode) and can't be used for audio playback until you disconnect it.

The Express is a little slow to start because it catalogs all of the songs on it at every bootup. The more songs you have the longer this will take. With the internal memory packed to the gills it only takes about six seconds on my player, so it's not a huge deal. This allows the Express to have its very slick, very functional navigation system that'll sort all of your music by artist, album, or both; Also by track title or you can just play them all as one alphabetical block. The player sorts artists, albums, and tracks by your MP3's ID3 tags (or your WMA files' metadata). If your files don't have ID3 tags things get considerably hairier, and the best you can probably hope for is the "play all" option. Of course, if your tags are wrong (say, a typo in one track's album name) the player has no way of knowing, and you'll get one "album" minus a song, and another "album" with the wrong name and one song in it.

There are additional quirks. At the moment the Express only seems to be able to correctly handle ID3 V1.1 and/or 2.4 tags. There are other versions (1.0, and 2.0 through 2.3) that apparently send the player into a semi-conniption and cause it to list tracks in reverse order. The good news is that Sandisk is aware of this issue and it's getting better as firmware updates roll out.

The bad news is that firmware updates are a massive pain. Sandisk don't just offer firmware updates on their web site like normal people. Rather, you have to download the "Sansa Firmware Updater," which is a one-size-fits-all deal for all Sansa models from the E200 series to the C series to the Express. You can't download the firmware by itself and the only way to even get your hands on it is through the Firmware Updater, which runs in your tray and automatically checks for updates (though you can turn it off) to apply them when you connect your player. At least it does have the courtesy to ask first. In order for the Firmware Updater to work, it sternly instructs you to put your player into MSC mode before connecting it. Well, alert readers will notice that you can't put the Express into MSC mode. The instructions don't mention it at all. The only mention is in SanDisk's FAQ about the express, and I quote:

"Q: Does the Sansa Express support MSC Mode?
A: The Sansa Express supports MTP Mode."

Which, really, doesn't answer anything. But fear not; The Device Manager trick I outlined above allows the updater to, well, update. But unless someone told you it's a fair bet you'd never figure it out. Also, the updater doesn't allow you to revert to previous firmware revisions, which will probably be a big fat bone of contention if SanDisk ever releases a revision that is either broken (unintentionally) or cripples some feature of the player (intentionally). So far neither of the above has happened. My Express came out of the box with very early firmware and the latest version has a pile of features that make it very worthwhile to go through the rigamarole of updating, namely the ability to format just the internal memory or card one at a time, a charging complete indicator, and other odds and ends.

When it's in operation, the player's D-pad and playback control buttons all light up blue. The screen and buttons turn off after an arbitrary amount of time that you can define in the settings. The volume and menu buttons don't light up at all, but they're easy to find by feel. The Express is about as easy and intuitive to use as any minuscule piece of consumer electronics can be. The back/forward and play/pause buttons work as you'd expect. When fast forwarding, the player starts off slow and smoothly increases in speed to give you a little seeking precision. The screen displays artist, album, and title as well as a track count and a progress bar for the duration of the song; The orange top bar shows the battery level.

The menu system really is rather nice. Pressing the menu button, well, puts you out at the main menu, which is graphical in nature and has four modes: Music (where you'll spend the most time), FM tuner, Voice (the Express has a built in mike and can take audio notes), and Settings. Inside the Music menu are the usual options for navigating by Artist, Album, Genre, Track, and Playlist (you have to create playlists with an outboard MTP program) as well as the option to just play everything as a big lump of music. You can also navigate to and play audio books and voice recordings from here. There is a lesser menu button opposite the play button, which is context sensitive. When you're playing music it takes you to a quick menu where you can toggle shuffle and repeat, mess with the built in EQ, or add the current track to the "Go List," which is a single playlist that you can generate (albeit slowly) on the fly with the player.

The FM tuner works as you'd expect and has the capability to save (but not name) an arbitrary number of presets. As most small gadgets with tuners in them, the Express uses the wire of your headphones as its antenna. This technique is the most compact way to do it without an outboard antenna, but it tends not to work too well indoors. Your reception mileage may vary. The voice recorder is nothing special, and like most other tiny MP3 players with built in recorders just cranks out low bitrate WAV's into a folder in the Express's internal storage. You can't record to a card. The microphone hole is located directly above the headphone jack.

The Express, thankfully, seems to have good decoding hardware and firmware in it, at least. It handles all reasonable bitrates and variable bitrate MP3's just fine, and seems to play just about anything even if it doesn't know what to make of its ID3 tag. I did not, I admit, test it with WMA's. The player doesn't support OGG or FLAC or any other fancypants formats. MP3, WMA, WAV, and Audible audio books, and that's it. It can handle protected WMA's (from the Microsoft end of things) and protected MP3's (from the Rhapsody/Napster end of things) but since I don't dance with the monkey myself I'm not sure what flavors of MP3 DRM it supports and doesn't. Something that's caused much wailing and gnashing of teeth is the player's inability to set bookmarks in Audible book files. Though it will return to where it was in a file if you turn it off in the middle of playback, it won't remember where it was if you change tracks or connect the player to a PC.

Unlike MobiBlu's diminutive Cube2, the Express doesn't do video playback. The utility of video playback on a screen less than an inch tall is debatable anyway. For what it's worth, the Express' screen is short and fat, allowing plenty of horizontal room for doing what it should be doing: Displaying text and track names.

Battery life, for something so danged tiny, is exceptional. SanDisk quote 15 hours, which in a rare stroke actually seems reasonable enough. Depending on your usage of the display, it's dead easy to make the Express go an entire 12 hour workday, non stop at about half volume, and still have the battery indicator showing at half. SanDisk themselves make vague allusions to "eventual" battery replacement. Anything with a Lithium Polymer battery like the Express will eventually require a replacement as its battery goes south 500 to a thousand charge/discharge cycles down the road (FULL discharge cycles, rather more partial ones) and the Express has two screws flanking the USB connector that seem like a promising entry point to get at the battery. I haven't worked up the guts to take mine apart yet; I don't imagine the battery will be anything terribly exotic. Probably just a couple of Lithium Polymer coin cells or similar, doubtlessly available from the Far East distributor of your choice as soon as you figure out what the cell type is.

You get goodies in the box: A pair of cheap earbud headphones (nearly identical to iPod 'phones but black), a short USB extension, a sheet of Sansa stickers featuring SanDisk's scribbly looking mascot, a neck lanyard, and some marketing fluff. There's also a driver and manual CD and a little quick setup guide that's not really that useful but is better than nothing. The real documentation is on the CD.

Overall the Express is an outstanding player, pummeling offerings like the MobiBlu Cube, Zen Stone, and iPod Shuffle and standing to snipe at the iPod Nano in the functionality department. Its shiny face is a fingerprint magnet, and there are a few firmware bugs to be ironed out but the player is still relatively brand spanking new. Judging by the performance SanDisk have put on with their E200 and C series players the Express should do nothing but improve as it matures. The MicroSD expansion is a killer feature, and the built in USB connector is as handy as it gets. The Express has the right balance of utility, real functionality, killer interface, and form factor to make it a winner.

Recommended: Yes