I've seen a few people who have put together guides to accessible MP3 players, and they all tend to overlook this one. I don't know why, because it's just as screeneless, reasonably priced, and it's a rather unique piece. This is the Sansa Shaker by Sandisk. I got a deal on it from www.buy.com in May when the red 1 GB model was on sale for about 20 bucks with free shipping. If you want to skip my description and see the official one by Sandisk, use this here link http://www.sandisk.com/Products/Default.aspx?CatID=1253 otherwise, you can read ahead.
So, this thing may be overlooked because it is marketted towards kids. But I think if you are a gizmo nut like me, you just won't care and will find it fun to use. It comes in various colors and you can get it with either 512 megs of storage or 1 GB, and I think you can also use a 2 GB SD card in the 1 gig model. Oh, that's right! This is a player that has no on-board memory, but will store your stuff on standard SD cards. First, what's it look like. Again, for you gizmo fans, you'll like the shape. It's pretty much a cylinder with a flat top and bottom and it's thinner in the middle than it is toward the ends. I suppose it's what you'd call an hourglass shape. I call it my salt shaker because it also looks like a high-tech salt shaker. The controls are way way easy to use. First, on top there's a small speaker, and although the sound is strong and not extremely shrill, the fidelity is limitted, probably best for voice recordings. There is one button which is flush with the rest of the unit, and that's more towards the bottom. This is your power and your play/pause button. There are two standard mini headphone jacks on it so two people can listen at once if you like. Finally, there is a band at the top for adjusting volume and a band at the bottom for skipping tracks forward or back. You just grip the band and twist it one way or the other to perform a function, and let go once you have things the way you want them, since they spring back when you're done. It is called the Shaker because you can also skip tracks by pressing and holding the Power/Play button while your track is playing and give it a vigorous shake up and down. You'll hear a camera shutter noise and it will skip tracks. I'm not sure if you can control in which direction it'll skip this way, so it may be a sort of randomizer. It's powered by a single AAA battery, and the website claims that will last ten hours while you are under headphones. The battery and the SD card as well as the port for the USB cable that comes with it are located under a twist-off cover on the bottom of the unit. You do not need special software to transfer files, so you can just use Windows Explorer to copy and paste from one location to the player. I believe it will only play MP3 and .wav files, and it comes with a small folder of sample MP3 files. I find that it will not play some MP3 files, but not sure what exactly it's picky about. But I'm pretty sure it'll play most MP3 files. It does not avhe any resume capabilities, so when you shut the player off and turn it on later, you are at the beginning of the file you were listening to. I actually use mine to play books on, even though the books are on MP3 CD as well. I can just use its little speaker and play my book while doing stuff in the kitchen or whatever. It's a nice little player, and it seems to do what it does well. Yes, I still think the Zen Stone is the most versatile off-the-shelf player, but this one is good if you want to either store things on multiple SD cards or you just want a groovy-looking gizmo to play your files on. It's worth a look if you just want something to play your MP3 files on. Please feel free to share this review wherever you'd like, as I don't think too many folks know about this one. Also, you can send it to anyone you know who might be putting together a guide for off-the-shelf players. Chris _______________________________________________ Sps mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://ogts.net/mailman/listinfo/sps_ogts.net __________ NOD32 3301 (20080727) Information __________ This message was checked by NOD32 antivirus system. http://www.eset.com Jonathan Mosen List Founder Audio List Help, Guidelines, Archives and more... http://www.pc-audio.org To unsubscribe from this list, send a blank email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
