Sandisk Sansa Clip Review

Sandisk are a company who are primarily associated in most consumers’ minds with the solid state memory market and have for years been providing great value and reliable storage for our mobile phones, pocket PCs and USB Pen Drives. What you may not be aware of is their range of products that extend beyond the world of portable storage but ultimately rely on their expertise in this area.

The most notable of these products from Sandisk is the Sansa Clip which is a portable music playing device from Sandisk that is aimed at the market created by the iPod shuffle for extremely small mp3 players which are aimed at runners and people who want a discrete portable music device that is also big on storage space. Luckily Sandisk have been able to trump their rivals at Apple in several ways with the Sansa Clip – surprised? Read on.

Sansa Clip Technical Details

The Sansa Clip is available in a variety of colours and with a variety of different storage capacities. The smallest memory size available in a Sansa Clip is 1GB, but 2GB, 4GB and 8GB models are available, and colours vary from black, blue, red, pink and silver, the latter of which is available exclusively on the 4GB model.

The Sansa Clip improves on the iPod shuffle because it has a 4 line OLED screen capable of displaying information about the track you’re listening to, and allows you to browse through the tracks that you have stored on your Sansa Clip, rather than simply relying on a randomised shuffle of music. This is sensible because of the large storage capacity, allowing you to store thousands of songs, which might become confusing if you had no way of viewing information about what was currently on your Sansa Clip. The OLED screen also helps keep costs down as the technology is not needlessly complicated and suited exactly to the job in hand.

The Sansa Clip is so named because it features a detachable clip which allows you to attach the unit to your belt or bag strap, and it is ideal for someone who really wants to listen to music on the move because unlike larger portable music devices which use internal hard drives with moving parts which can cause skipping during vigorous movement like exercise, the Sansa Clip uses flash storage with no moving parts so there’s no fear of interruption to your listening caused by too much movement. Because there are no moving parts it also means that the Sansa Clip has a really great battery life so you won’t have to worry about charging it up every five minutes.

Topping off the Sansa Clip’s impressive specifications is the inclusion of an FM radio tuner which is great if you want to catch up on the news or listen to commercial radio on your morning commute, and also a voice recorder for making notes or memos to yourself, all of which can be saved to the Sansa Clip’s hard drive and then transferred to your PC or laptop to listen back to.

Click Here to Buy the Sansa Clip

Sandisk Sansa Clip Styling

The first thing to comment on would be the size of the Sansa Clip. It is really one of the smallest mp3 players you’ll ever see, and Sandisk often use comparison shots of it next to a car key to illustrate just how dinky the Sansa Clip is. This means that it is ultra portable and light and won’t be a burden on your pocket, bag, purse or belt. The 4GB silver version is arguably the coolest looking of the range, with a mirror finish and the small screen jumping out from behind the smoked plastic, which looks very futuristic and is the most original design of the range.

The Sansa Clip uses a control style that users of the iPod Classic will be familiar with, with a circular navigation and scroll wheel performing all the controls, and it works just as well here as on Apple’s device.

The headphones supplied with the Sansa Clip are probably the biggest disappointment because they are pretty cheap and the sound quality is not the best, but at least you have the option of buying a better set of headphones of your own choosing.

All in all there’s a lot to like about the Sansa Clip, not just because it provides a viable alternative to the bigger brands but also because it can be had for a steal on several big web retailers, and by trying to be great at what it does rather than spreading itself too thinly and doing too much badly, Sandisk have hit a winner.

Click Here to Buy the Sansa Clip

Copyright Gadget Heaven™ 2008

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