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| Home >> Handheld & PDA Reviews: SanDisk Sansa View 16 GB Video MP3 Player (Black) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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User Submitted SanDisk Sansa View 16 GB Video MP3 Player (Black) Reviews (cont...)Date: 2008-06-06 Poor Performance and Missing Features This is a well-priced product that performs in accord with its low price. In the few months having owned this product battery life, which started out strong as advertised, has now fallen to only retaining a charge for 2-3 hours. Another annoyance about the the Sansa View is that it lacks an important basic feature needed for enjoying audiobooks - no bookmarking. It is surprising that Sandisk advertises this product as compatible with Audible's products, and indeed it is, but they failed to provide this most basic feature needed for maximum enjoyment of audiobooks. Many times the player failed to remember where I left off in a book - forcing a fast forward to search where I was. This is not too bad using Audible books, but if you're listening NetLibrary books a lack of bookmarking is a [i]fatal flaw[/i]. For audiobook listeners I recommend searching for a different product. Creative seems to know about bookmarking and provide that feature to some of their products. Note: Out of the box, the product's fast forward feature was unusably slow for audio books, however, recent firmware upgrades seem to have adequately repaired this. The on/off switch seems to not work quite often. The reason is that the unit needs frequent resetting (holding the on switch on for 10 seconds). Another failing with this product is Sandisk's incomplete documentation and poor support on their anemic web site. Sandisk just doesn't appear serious about making and supporting an excellent product. In summary I subtracted a star for the following points: 1. no bookmarking 2. poor battery life after a few months of use. 3. poor documentation and support. If Sandisk would address these items I would feel the product worthy of a 5 star review. Date: 2008-06-03 Can't Leave a Good Thing Alone I was just getting ready to plunk down my $$$ when I noticed that for all the improvements in screen size and capacity, the battery isn't replacable. Why would SanDisk do such a thing? It was what made the e280 stand apart from the others. Battery goes bye-bye, simply order another one, open up the back, pop it in and you're back in business. Great selling point, but the inability to install a new battery is a deal killer for me. As a SanDisk rep put it: "At this time, we do not have a repair faculity at all. Maybe in the future we will, but this is all undetermined. No way to resolve it, if the battery is dead." The Sansa is a bit larger than the e200 series, but the extra screen size is worth it. Date: 2008-05-31 look elsewhere Bought this 4 months ago, and from the start, video would play fine for 29 minutes... and then lock-up. Works fine as an MP3 player, but you'd get the same performance out of a $40 player. Tech Support's only fix is for me to turn it on and off endlessly in the hopes that the device will magically fix itself. If you're looking for video, loo to Apple instead. (And yeah, it hurts me to say that that!) Date: 2008-05-30 Great hardware suffers from poor firmware This is a well-built player. The size is compact, yet the screen is not too small. The button placement and the click (ish) wheel are both intuitively placed and easy to use. While the hardware is promising, the player suffers from poor firmware. The preinstalled firmware (01.01.06) suffers from numerous bugs. Rewinding a song does not work, and when you try to select a different song from the currently playing list, you have to start scrolling down from the top--every time. The newer version (01.02.09) fixes most of these problems but has a bug that causes the player to get only about three hours of battery life. It's a nice choice, Sandisk: buggy behavior or no battery life. I haven't used the video capabilities, so I cannot comment on them. While the hardware is designed very well, the ridiculous choice as far as firmware (and no foreseeable updates although Sandisk claims to be working on them) almost makes the player unusable. The Sansa line has better products. Date: 2008-05-30 In my experience: a horrible player! This is not so much a review as my personal experience with the Sansa View: I was excited by the Sansa View: it had a nice design and seemed like a sensible alternative to the ever-present ipod. However, the Sansa view turned out to be a piece of junk. It took me (and some tech-savvy friends) a couple hours to figure out how to get my computer to recognize the player. Then another couple of hours to sync the music up. When I did get it to work, the quality was not good: even with good headphones the volume was very soft. The battery also drained quickly (~5 hours) To top it off, my player broke. The screen went completely blank. After hours of inconclusive tech-support, I sent in my player to get a new one. The new one ALSO broke: the input to the headphones bent. This made the music less audible and created lots of static. Needless to say, I have sent in my broken player. I will not be getting another Sansa View. I recommend the same for you.
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