Sandisk - Sansa View

Sandisk's Sansa e200 series of ‘Nano killers' received rave reviews across the market last year, playing a large part in putting the memory specialist's portable player range back on the map.

Despite the fact that it couldn't trump Apple's aesthetics, Sony's sound or Archos's adaptability, it taught all of these companies a lesson in value for money. The road to the next generation, the Sansa View, was a bumpy one, seeing Sandisk abandon its plans for an Archos-style PMP in favour of a more traditional Nano-type design.

After getting our hands on one, we're not convinced that this was the best choice; the new Sansa is a pretty chunky player and, while this allows it to offer a 2.4-inch widescreen display and an excellent 35 hour (7 for video) battery life, we must admit to expecting something a little more compact. The dimensions (108 x 49 x 9mm, weighing 82g) are those of your average sized mobile phone.

In terms of features, you'll find support for MP3, WAV, WMA, secure WMA and Audible formats, along with JPEG photos and improved video support that now includes DivX-encoded MPEG-4 in addition to WMV and H.264. There's also an FM radio and voice recorder built in.

All of this is controlled by a traditionally styled mechanical scroll wheel and a single ‘Home' button which allows you to quickly skip in and out of applications. Handily, the device automatically switches to landscape mode for photo and video playback, but despite suggestions to the contrary we weren't particularly impressed by its generic support of a range of compatible video formats.

We'd always prefer to adopt a drag-and-drop approach where possible with these players, but despite testing a range of video files we ended up resorting to using Sandisk's rather bloated 86MB video conversion application, downloadable from the Web site at www.sandisk.com/support/sansa/. This admittedly works pretty well, and will convert and transfer video files directly to the player on the fly. Despite larger capacities making it ideal for the purpose, we're not sure how successful it'll be in this area since the screen, whilst clear, isn't particularly vibrant for video and does put a bit of a strain on your eyes after a time.

In terms of control, you'll find yourself well catered for regarding music, which adds categories such as Podcasts, Audiobooks and a song rating system to traditional artist/album/genre views. There's a handful of preset equalizers along with a custom option for tweaking the audio. You'll probably find yourself fiddling with this quite a bit, and while certainly capable we weren't overly impressed by the quality of the sound in comparison to rivals such as Sony, and you'll almost certainly end up replacing the supplied earphones before long.

Sandisk hasn't particularly impressed us so far with the Sansa View, then, but as we head into home territory for the manufacturer it becomes apparent that it might well have another winner in the offing. You can pick up a View in either 8GB or 16GB capacities in this country and at the time of writing they were going for around £95 and £125 respectively. This means you can pick up a 16GB player for the same price as an 8GB iPod Nano, which represents spectacular value for money. In addition you'll find a MicroSD/SDHC slot on the side, offering the ability to double the capacity for an extra £50 or so.

This is obviously the Sansa View's saving grace, and goes a long way towards making up for our initial disappointment over the design and rather basic nature. We can see this selling well among slightly less discerning consumers, and must end by congratulating Sandisk in pricing its rivals out of the market yet again(itreviews.co.uk)