Sansa e280
There really is no excuse any more for buggy manuals, difficult software and substandard interfaces in consumer products. A pox on all the game-rattled software engineers who spent their youth playing fantasy role playing games. I don’t want to become a Ninja Master to listen to some music.
I was excited to find a Sansa e280, a 8GB MP3 player, under the Christmas tree. Last year, I received a Sansa 1GB player that occupies the low end of the spectrum, but it plugged in and worked from day one. I’m still using it, while the e280 is packed up for its return to Sansa.
Here’s the problem: Sansa includes an instruction pamphlet that advises you to go to Settings > USB Mode to choose the correct mode for transferring your MP3 files. The Settings menu does not include an option “USB Mode”. None of the options that are there include “USB Mode”. The player does not “auto-select” USB Mode either. I can’t get content onto the player.
Ah, let’s see if there’s a firmware update for this new product. There is! Right there on Sansa’s website! And, there’s the media conversion file to make video files compatible with the player. I down load both installation programs.
The media conversion program insists I don’t have enough disk space to install it. I have 132 GB free. Perhaps its corrupted. I re-download it, and the program once again complains that it needs some space, and 132 GB of free space is not enough. Fine, I only listen to music anyway, so I’ll skip the media conversion.
The firmware updater installs just fine, thank you, and asks me to plug in my e280. It recognizes it … for a few seconds. Then it proclaims that I have no memory left on the player, and besides, it can’t recognize the player anymore.
I uninstall the firmware updater, and just for grins, try installing the media conversion program again. It installs this time. Hey, maybe I’ll run a video through the player. I plug it in, the media conversion program recognizes the player … for 5 seconds. Then it can no longer recognize it. I close the media conversion program and reopen it. Same process.
WindowsXP recognizes the Sansa e280 just fine. I can see it as a disk, with nearly all of its 8MB of space, but Windows Media Player cannot write MP3 to it because … somewhere, “over the rainbow”, there is a configuration setting that takes the place of the “Settings > USB Mode” wild goose chase in the manual. Perhaps there’s one of those “game hints” sites out on the ‘net somewhere that tells you to push this while scrolling that, tap that other thing three times and push RESET to get to it. But alas, I do not want to have to become a Lord Duke of the Dungeons of Denomia to listen to some music.
I’m thinking of an iRiver Clix or … an Ipod. Never been an Apple guy, but I understand you don’t have to be a Ninja Master to listen to music on an Ipod.
