Ive been a firm believer for many years now that in the world of digital media players, the iPod has lost its mystique.
I've been a big fan of Apple and its great products over the years, I even had high hopes for them in their bad years, but I started a mini crusade a while back. I want to stop all this hype.
What people don't know is that other companies stepped up as soon as the iPod hype started and created a great variety of mp3 players. Some of these are by all means better in almost all ways than the iPod. I need to start by saying that I have a full profound respect for the Apple company and its product, but a personal thing against the hype.
This all started when I was in the market for a new mp3 player, with high hopes that it would be an iPod, a nano to be more exact. I did what any responsible buyer would do, I did my research.
Turns out that many companies have top notch players. In my search I came upon the Sandisk e200 series. I instantly fell in love with it. It offered everything that the Nano offer like picture and a 4 gig capability plus a lot more. The Sansa, as it is called, offered the ability of video and a flash based memory (which allows for faster searches through your library, compared to the hard drive base iPods). It also had a FM tuner and a voice recorder plus the ability of extra memory through its SD memory card slot. The only thing you had to compromise was the size. The Sansa which wasn't as thin as the Nano was only a bit bigger, about the width of a pencil, but was a bit shorter. The screen and the resolution is also bigger and better than the nano, by a lot. One thing that might not be very important and is overlooked ofter is the battery. The Sansa offers a removable lithium battery, this is important because once this battery dies out from years of recharges you can just order the battery and not have to send in the player to have it professionally changed. The best thing about all of this was that when I bought it, a few days after its release, it was brand new and cheaper than its competitor, by about 50 bucks.
So now a proud owner of a 4 gig Sandisk Sansa for almost 2 years its still probably one of the best mp3 players out there.
I'm just putting that out there.
