Posts Tagged Sandisk
Sansa Clip Plus MP3 Player – 4GB for $40
I’ll admit that I like my iPod and travel with it a lot, but I’m kind of ambivalent about it. I hate the fact that you can’t play a regular song purchased from iTunes on other players, while an MP3 can be played on pretty much anything. You can go the other way, however, importing anything into iTunes, which means that songs in the MP3 format are essentially more valuable than ones in Apples’ AAC format.
Just as Windows laptops give you far more for your money than Apple ones, MP3 players tend to be much cheaper and more flexible than Apple’s players. Take this Sansa Clip+, which holds 4GB of songs (the equivalent of two 4th-generation Shuffles) and also accepts the cool little SlotRadio cards preloaded with music. And it has an FM radio with 40 presets. Plus a mic for voice recording. All that for $50 list and only $40 at Amazon. Is that a deal or what?
I’ve been using one that SanDisk sent me to try out for a couple weeks now and this Clip+ is a screaming bargain. I loaded it up with all the MP3s I had on my computer and played the radio sometimes too, both through earbuds and through the iHome mini speakers I reviewed last week. As usual, the earbuds that came with it were crappy, but when I plugged in my own good ones the sound was indistinguishable from that of my iPod.
The navigation is pretty simple and easy to figure out, with songs arranged by album, artist, and playlist. A quick click of the home button on the front takes you to the main menu. Simple controls allow you to do all the usual—pause, go back or forward in the tracks, and raise/lower the volume. There’s a power button on the top, though with no “hold” button to keep it from starting up in your bag. Battery life is15 hours, so that’s probably not much of a worry. It has a standard mini USB plug (yea) and the included cord recharges it through any USB hub. A bright display on top tells you what song is on—the main drawback of the Shuffle in my opinion.
Besides MP3s, it supports WMA, secure WMA, Audible, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, and audio books/podcasts. Plus there’s a microSD card slot, which also doubles as a SlotRadio card player. If you get sick of your own 1,000-song collection this will hold, pop in one of those prerecorded cards and you’ve got 1,000 new songs instantly.
This is one tiny player too. See the photo below where I put it on top of my iPod. It barely even covers the video display area. And it has a clip on the back to keep it secured to your clothing when you are running or biking. No accessory needed. It comes in black, red, or blue, also in 2GB and 8GB versions.
Apple has become so dominant in music players that it is hard for anyone else to make a dent, but this is certainly a worthy competitor to the Shuffle or Nano, especially if you don’t care about watching video on a teeny screen or shooting video, like the new Nano does. If you’re getting a gift for a child or will be getting your music somewhere else besides iTunes—like eMusic, your own CD collection or Amazon’s better-priced MP3 store—then this player is a terrific value.
Get the Sansa Clip+ 4GB at Amazon
25 FREE Downloads. eMusic for your iPod or any MP3 player
Posted by Tim in Kids and Family, Travel Light on December 20th, 2009
Turn Your Mobile Phone Into an MP3 Player
I let my colleague John handle most of the geek-tech travel gadgets on this blog because I have little patience for long instruction manuals. I’m the guy who uses a phone for a year before he figures out that it has some cool feature hidden in level four of the “settings” menu.
When someone from SanDisk reminded me that those little microSDHC cards can be used to move hundreds of songs from my computer to my phone, I figured it would be a royal pain in the rear. “But I don’t have an adapter,” I said as an excuse. So she sent me an adapter. Well, two actually.
The first adapter looks like the regular (larger) SD cards most digital cameras use. You slide the microSDHC card into the adapter, put the whole thing into any card reader (on my HP laptop that’s built in), and then you just transfer files over to the card via the adapter.
The $10 MobileMate Micro Reader adapter is for more easily-found USB ports. Once again, slide the teeny card into it, plug it into any USB port, and transfer over the MP3s.
Even for my wimpy and annoying Nokia phone I got free when signing up with AT&T, getting music on the phone was a simple process. Now if I’m ever somewhere without a music player, I’ve got one anyway with my cell phone. Even cooler, this homemade card works in the slotRadio player I reviewed a while back. So if you get sick of the preloaded cards you can buy for the slotRadio player, you can switch it out and put in your own tunes.
One caveat though with the phones: some of them will only accept a regular SD card up to 2GB and these SDHC cards are a different format plus they go from 4GB to 16GB. If you put one of these into a phone manufactured before 2007, you will probably get some cryptic message about formatting and you’ll spend an hour online trying to figure out the problem. And of course if your phone doesn’t have a microSD slot you can’t use this method at all—which means you’re stuck with what the manufacturer gives you for storage capacity. That’s one huge drawback of the iPhone or iPod Touch: they want you to buy more capacity from them via a more expensive device, not via storage cards that will keep getting cheaper.
But most of the newer mobile phones have a slot because this is also where you store photos, videos you shot, or voice memos. Most non-Apple smart phones also have a micro card slot. Check the nifty SDHC compatibility wizard on the SanDisk product site before shopping for your device.
The SanDisk microSDHC cards list for $32 to $109 on their site, but you can usually find them on sale for less at one of the following online retailers:
SDHC 8gb card with adapter or 8gb card with USB adapter at Amazon
Search Buy.com USA and Canada
Search J&R Computer/Music World
Posted by Tim in Business Gear, Travel Light on September 17th, 2009
Sansa slotRadio: Pre-programmed Tunes to Go
The Sansa slotRadio is a strange concept, but it works brilliantly in practice. It’s a pre-loaded MP3 player with 1,000 songs, plus a radio, all in a tiny clip-on package. Put a new chip in the slot, you’ve got 1,000 new songs instantly.
I love my iPod Classic, especially when I’m on a long flight or I need to keep my daughter entertained while traveling. The thing is, as user-friendly as the whole interface is, I’m really lazy about loading it up with new music, despite the fact I’ve got a thousand CDs sitting one room away from the computer…and I have an eMusic subscription…and I review new world music albums every couple months for Perceptive Travel. But unlike a teenager with all the time in the world, I always seem to have something else higher on the to-do list.
So I was intrigued by the idea of this Sansa player as a time saver and I’ve enjoyed it far more than I expected. First there’s the level of surprise, which is ever better than it is with the iPod Shuffle because you really don’t know what’s coming next. You didn’t load it up to start with. Plus you can see the artist and song name on the display—my main beef with the Shuffle. It’s almost as small as the 2nd generation Shuffle though, and has a clip on the back, plus it has a radio for listening to NPR or local music in a foreign country. Not a bad value for a hundred bucks including the first 1,000 song sampler.
To load up new music, you simply pop out the old card and pop in a new one. You have to be careful getting them out of the annoying blister pack they come in though: the micro cards are smaller than a fingernail and it took me a couple minutes to find mine on my messy desk when it went flying out of the packaging. These slotRadio cards are $40 each for 1,000 songs and come categorized by Hip-hop, Country, 80s/90s music, etc. If you do the math that’s a few cents per song (compared to a buck at iTunes), a good deal considering these are mostly top-notch name artists, A-list tunes rather than also-rans that were cheap to license.
The mix is sometimes bizarre—it’ll go from The James Gang to Caesars to Jefferson Airplane in the “workout” playlist of the radio mix version—but that’s part of the charm. If you don’t want to listen to Coldplay for the umpeenth thousandth time, just hit the skip button and go to the next tune. It’s like satellite radio with no commercials, but the ability to move on if a song is getting on your nerves. Not as fine-tuned as your own playlists or Pandora, but maybe that’s a good thing. I might not put Tom Petty or Cheap Trick on my own iPod, but I always seem to like those old songs enough to let them run when they come on.
To get these tunes, however, you have to accept a proprietary system with digital rights management. In other words, no copying. You lose the card, you lose the songs. You lose the player with a card in it, there’s no backup at home. If you and a few friends or family members had these slotRadio players though, you could pass around the cards of course. The slotRadio Mix card comes with seven preset playlists of different musical styles like Country and Alternative. Or you can buy individual cards for each genre and those are split into subcategories. For instance the Hip-hop/R&B one I tried out had subcategories like “Love Jams,” “Old School,” and “Dance R&B.”
The headphones suck, as they usually do with all these portable players. Even a decent $10 pair will help, but when I plugged in my Koss KEB24 or Comply NR-10 earbuds I heard a much wider frequency range. The oldies all sounded a bit distorted at high volume, but the Hip-hop tunes sounded better than those on my iPod.
While this may not be the player you want to take on a long round-the-world journey, it would be great to grab while heading out the door on vacation. You would have preset playlists to please everyone and at least 50 hours of continuous music per card.
See more at the Sandisk slotRadio site.
Posted by Tim in General Gear, Travel Light on May 13th, 2009
