Sandisk Sansa e130

Michael Gartenberg | July 06, 2005, 10:40 AM

I've been using the Sandisk Sansa e130 as part of my work recently and it's a pretty impressive device. The 512mb unit costs about as much as an iPod shuffle and is often discounted to about tend dollars or so less. What you get is a tiny player with a nice sized display, FM radio, SRS WOW (which makes the headphones sound a lot better in my opinion) and a nice carrying case. The unit also has an SD slot so you can bump it up to over 2gig with an add on card (Which is nice as memory prices keep dropping you have some expansion head room). Even nicer is that the unit sees all memory installed as one contiguous block (no small feat but expected since this unit comes from the experts in the flash memory market). It supports WMA and purchased downloads but not subscription downloads (which is a shame). Overall, it's a much better value than the iPod shuffle except for one thing, it's not an iPod and that's a deal killer for a lot of consumers.