Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

I've had two different SanDisk Sansa Clips, and both have given me radically different experiences, so this is going to be a strange review. I bought the first Sansa Clip when I was in Las Vegas for CES 2008, because I knew I was going to start working out when I returned home and wanted something as small as possible (the Zune 8 is too big for my needs). I picked up the 2 GB version (they didn't have the 4 GB at the time) in red, and was quite impressed with the brightness and clarity of the little two-colour, four-line OLED screen they managed to put on it. I liked having the voice recorder because it allowed me to make a voice recording of my lock combination code, and yes, I did have to use it when I forgot what the combination was. The sound quality is pretty good as well (loaded up with 128 kbps WMA files), although it doesn't go loud enough when you're working out at a noisy gym. I've used it with both the Super.fi 5 EB and the Metro.fi 2 Ultimate Ears headphones, and I have no complaints about the sound.

One of the main reasons I bought it was for the integrated clip. I had a Zen Stone but refused to spend nearly as much for the clip as for the player itself, so I figured I'd get a new player instead. My wife uses a second-generation iPod Shuffle and she loves how she can simply clip it to part of her workout outfit and go - I clipped the Sansa Clip to the waistline of my gym shorts and it worked pretty well, though on two occasions the Sansa Clip disconnected from the clip and fell to the gym floor. Not all that impressive. Anythingbutipod.com has a detailed review that talks about all the features if you want to dive deeper. Back to my tale of techno-woe. Read more...