SanDisk Sansa e140 MP3 player review

16 August 2005 10:12 GMT / By Debbie Davies

Here at Gizmogirl, SanDisk is the logical company to buy an mp3 player from. It is the Tupperware of the digital world, with a huge range of tiny containers for storing your digital junk. The company's latest storage device is an mp3 player with some nice features and a few drawbacks.

On the plus side, the e140 version of the player comes with 1GB of storage and a
card slot for SD cards. If you already own a bunch of SD cards, then you have an MP3 player with a storage level only limited by the number of cards you own and their capacity, for less than £100.00. This is handy if you want to listen to ebooks on your Sansa, use it to carry files other than audio, as well as just being your MP3 player.

Small and light enough to fit into any pocket, the player has a backlit five line display. Five lines of text onscreen saves having to scroll right to read
information. There are plenty of options for sorting songs including by artist,
album, song title, genre, year, date loaded and recently added. An AB feature lets you select a start point and end point and play that segment over and over if you like. We used it to learn foreign langauge clips; handy if you are holidaying abroad.

As with SanDisk's previous MP3 players, no drivers are required and files can be
easily copied via USB 2.0 just like a hard drive. The earphones that come with the player are far superior to what we expect from bundled phones and a reason to choose the Sansa if you do not already own a decent set. This is a major plus as many suppliers choose to cut corners in this area and unlike Apple, don't even stop to make them look fashionable as compensation for below-par sound.

There is also a handy radio as an alternative to your music. The digital FM tuner has 20 presets and picked up stations like BBC Radio 4 clearly in our tests.

Verdict

On the downside, the player runs on an AAA battery. A battery indicator shows you how much power you have left. We managed about 14 hours playback from one battery, which is good in the short term, but if you're a heavy user, the Sansa is, in my opinion, an environmentally unfriendly and ultimately expensive option.

Overall, we can't help feeling that despite all its benefits this player just doesn't have the looks to be included in our bag on a daily basis. It is small, light and very portable but feels a bit plasticky.

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Review Recap

Made by: SanDisk
Price as reviewed: £100
Latest price: Compare prices
The good: Unlimited storage, excellent earphones
The bad: AAA battery
Quick verdict: If you are not buying Apple, then this is a very good Windows friendly player
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