tgregoryt's Full Review: SanDisk Sansa m240 (1 GB) MP3 Player
I've had a lot of Sandisk products in the past and none of them ever gave me any trouble. They last a long time and seem compatible with everything. I bought this player for $59 at one of those early-bird special deals (6 AM the day after Christmas), and I've been satisfied with it since. The software makes it a little difficult to arrange your music, but otherwise I have found no problems with it. I give the player 4 stars; 5 stars for quality, sound, and size, but minus one star for annoying software.
The product's only weakness is its software. You can load all of your songs into it using cut and paste (the included cord attaches to the USB port in your computer making a separate, 1-gig disk), but the player does not recognize your folders. Instead, it arranges each song by artist and by genre. This is great if the song is one your player recognizes, but if it doesn't recognize the song it will put it into an "other category", in a partially random order. In my case I had language tapes, and rather then going sequentially, the lessons skipped all over the place.
The included booklet indicates that the internal software of the payer will recognize the artist and genre, and it will also recognize the playlists in your computer. This is not quite true - it recognizes playlists, but only modified playlists. In order to arrange my music, I used Windows player, loaded all of my files into playlists, then sent the playlists into the player, then opened the playlist with Microsoft Notepad, and then deleted the drive information in the playlist. For every song, I had to do something like the following:
'media src="C:\Music\love\Guns and Roses - November Rain.mp3"/
had to be changed to:
media src="Guns and Roses - November Rain.mp3"/'
While the playlist had been opened with Notepad. Sound complicated? This included booklet also indicated that you can save certain songs to a "favorites" playlist by pressing some button five times and clicking your heels together while standing on your head. That sounded more complicated, and seemed to include only one playlist. Suffice it o say that any way you arrange you music on this machine, it will be a complex process.
Even after rewriting my playlists, the player still did not recognize the folders. So instead of having four folders to quickly jump to, I have 115 ordered songs. This is a vast improvement to the 115 random songs, however.
The remainder of the player is somewhat standard, although it has a few things which appear to be extra. It comes with an FM tuner, which I suppose is useful if you run out of songs with your one gigabyte of memory. This generally won't help you at the football game, however, as it is only the FM band and not the AM band. I will admit that this was most useful on my 13 hour Orlando to Ft. Lauderdale Amtrak experience, however.
The player also comes with a voice recorder. The other reviewers of this product are like me and don't have use for a voice recorder. If you are in college, however, maybe you want to tape your professors lectures, or at least you can tell this to your parents when you ask for the player for your birthday.
The player comes with Sandisk's bud earphones, which are decent. I wouldn't consider them anything special, however, as they tend to lack bass. The player itself comes with a graphic equalizer - I would guess if you hook this up to your speakers at home you can get all the bass you need. With the included earphones, however, expect a bunch of treble. Also the bud earphones don't stay in your ears very well, but that's an overall bud earphone problem and not a Sandisk problem. If you use the unit to jog or work out, the included earphones will not work.
If you plan on using this unit during your workout, however, you will be pleased with the included carrying case. The case is clear plastic, and makes it a little difficult to change the battery, but it is plastic and will shed sweat. I use this on jogs - up to 5 hours - and have had no problems. The arm band is some kind of nylon/spandex with Velcro, and I suspect will fit any arm. The overall weight of the device is around 3 ounces (including case) and should not interrupt any but the most diehard gram-counters.
Battery life also seems average. I get about 7 hours on a new battery (one AAA) with the power cranked up to about 70%. I know this because I ran a marathon with this device on a windy day and needed to crank up the headphones to hear anything. The player was still going strong when I finished my race at 5.5 hours.
Personally I prefer the software that came with my Creative MP3 player. It keeps your files and songs in the order in which you load them. Still the Sandisk is a solid product, and I can recommend it to anyone looking for a player. I give the unit four stars - five stars for the player itself but minus one for silly software.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 59 Recommended for: Athletes - Lightweight and Portable, Perfect for the Gym
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