Customer Reviews
Amazing product! Been using for about 2 years 
2008-03-21
I am absolutely shocked at the bad reviews for this product. I have had this and use it constantly for about 2 years. When I first got this, one of my kids accidentally cracked the screen, I called Sandisk customer support and they sent me a new one, which I received in 3 days. Then I had a problem with it and called customer support again, I had to update the firmware, which they talked me through. THEN my player was sitting in water for a couple of hours, the back of it was soaked. It STILL WORKED!, and is still working as well as when I received it. Yesterday I had the same problem with the firmware, which I called customer support for again, and they walked me through it. If your player just stops working call 1-866-SANDISK, they are wonderful. I love the way the sansa works, it is very easy to use. I just ordered the sansa view 16 GB mp3 player and I am going to give my son the Sansa e270. You can get it for about $170 which is a great price for 16 GB. I can't wait! There is a vehicle charger available for the Sansa e270. It is $29.95. Just search for it on Amazon. Amazing product, I have had absolutely no unresolvable problems with it or with customer support! 5 stars for sure. Love it! 2 years and still going strong. I feel like it will work forever! GREAT product!
Wow... so unexpected what happened... if you want an "mp3 player" get something else... 
2008-03-21
I have been messing with the unit extensively for about 3-4 weeks now. Like usual, I had transferred over all of my media over to the unit and everything seemed to be working fine. Or so i thought. Turns out, this unit is EXTREMELY picky about the mp3's it will and won't play. I found it sort of weird at first when I had put the unit on shuffle and some of the same songs looped over and over again. It was because the unit failed to play the other or so 3 gigs of my music altogether. It was strange... and that's not all. When I tried different methods of transferring over my music to get it to read, the unit just kept reseting itself, and reconnecting to my Windows XP over and over again... this was especially noticeable when I was trying to rename my songs off of the unit, and move files around within the unit itself (not through Windows). Overall, when I had first purchased this thing, I was really happy with the way everything had functioned. But then I started really messing with it (i.e. taking it to workout and so forth). Save your money people... I simply wasted my money on this thing. Buyers remorse? Absolutely. Especially since it won't do well what it was designed to do... play mp3's. So sad now. Also, as a sad ironic note, all the .avi and divx files I had transferred over using the supplied program with the unit played rather beautifully and sharp. But the thing is, I bought it to play mp3's, and not videos. Oh well... hope this review helped.
Use Rockbox! 2008-03-05
First, this is a pretty darn good product. It's fast, has good playback, and the screen is beautiful. Features are awesome. But I'm only rating it 5 stars when you take into the one thing you definitely, DEFINITELY need for this player: ROCKBOX!
Rockbox is open-source, community-developed firmware. It does so much cool stuff I can't even begin to tell you. It adds your songs to a searchable database, so you can find that one song you want to listen to. It allows you to play gapless, high-quality video (I currently have superbad on there, it takes up about 800 mb, looks nice). If you use the standard firmware, there's a long (10-second) gap every few minutes.
Rockbox also does something amazing, that I've never seen elsewhere. I'm a big guy (6'4"), so this thing is tiny in my hand. Like most mp3 players and cell phones, it's pretty uncomfortable to press the buttons/use the controls at the BOTTOM of the player -- your thumb bends way down. I was sitting there thinking "well at least I can turn it upside down and just use the controls in my pocket" -- but then ROCKBOX amazed me again. There's a set-and-forget "upside down display" option. It is... AMAZING. Possibly the coolest gadget thing I've ever seen. It not only flips the display vertically, it changes the orientation of the controls so they are "normal" -- e.g., up becomes down, left becomes right. And the power button, which is really inconveniently placed if you're holding it "right side up", is now SO easy to hit -- and that's important, since you use it to control a lot of stuff.
I really can't say enough about rockbox, there's another feature that is incredible: ReplayGain. If you don't know what this is, you're missing out. Ever notice how sometimes you're playing some songs, and suddenly one is really loud or quiet? Annoying, isn't it? You COULD go through and re-encode all of those to "normalize" them, but that would be really dumb. ReplayGain (use foobar2000 to set your tracks) puts a new id3 tag in each file that specifies how loud the player should play it back, so everything plays at a nice, even volume. That feature alone, for me, is an iPod killer.
Overall, once appropriately firmwared, this player is really nice -- 20 hours of recording straight to mp3, either through the (decent) mic or from FM. I'm really glad I picked it up; it's by far superior to the iPod Touch, because of file search and ReplayGain. Just google Rockbox -- it took me all of 5 minutes to install!
Really nifty if it wasn't completely useless... 
2008-02-29
As soon as this little gem arrived in the mail, I broke it out of the box and plugged into my Mac Mini.. and nothing. Mac OS didn't even recognize that I had plugged something in. It didn't recognize it as a removable drive, and iTunes had no idea that an MP3 player was attached. OS X didn't even complain when I disconnected the device "improperly". The device has a number of nice features, but I hardly got to use them, much less did I get to experience the infamous firmware bugs I keep reading about, thanks to its complete incompatibility with OS X. There is absolutely no reason why Windows should be able to simply see this MP3 player as a removable drive when it doesn't even exist to OS X. I've read reports that the device works perfectly with Linux, so this has to be a deliberate limitation. I should have bought an iPod.
expansion slot only uses "microsd cards" 2gb max. 2008-02-26
CAUTION-- The Sansa website states "that all "microsd" and "microsdhc" cards may be used with the e200 series players". That is a FALSE statement!!!! All the e200 series players may only use the "microsd card" maximum--2gb. NONE of the players may use the microsdhc cards. I checked the website before I bought an e260 player. I bought an 8gb "microsdhc" card and I found out the hard way. I wrote customer support and basically got the answer OOPS!! Sorry your screwed. I am now the proud owner of an 8gb microdsdhc card that has no use. If you plan to add more than 2gb to these players forget it!!!
Cool product! 2008-06-02
I really enjoy this! I listen to it in my car and absolutely love it!! And I really like how it has an SD Expansion slot so that you can put even MORE music on it!!
Not a great model. 2008-05-15
Apparently, this product comes as a e270 or an e270v - but it isn't advertised which one you're buying. The one I purchased is unable to add playlists and unable to delete tracks directly from the player. Just wish I had known which one I was purchasing and the differences between the two.
Got for great price, but would not recommend it 
2008-04-28
First of all, I hate iPod's. I want something that can plug into a PC and read/write like a stick drive. Sansa's are great for that, but it won't accept storing non-media files, which would be nice if it did.
This device has pretty good battery life, voice recording, sound, interface, the buttons/thumb-wheel is a bit frustrating, and it doesn't play a lot of mp3s that I have that play on other devices just fine, I'm not just talking about a few mp3s, there're many cases and it's extremely annoying. I even tried converting the mp3s in wmv format and it still doesn't work. Not only that but all files need to be tagged precisely in order for the unit to recognize albums/files.
Best part is that I had to move in a hurry and lost the charger cable, and it's irreplaceable, and no stores carry it, so I'm going to pay $20 plus shipping and handling, or just purchase a cheaper unit that comes with it for 60 bucks, then I would have 2 units I'm not happy with!
iRiver has been the only units I've been %100 pleased with, not sure what happened to them. I'm going to try another brand name.
Good, but had to update software!!! 2008-04-21
I think it was a really good choice, but at short time using it, it started to freeze, but i just used the sansa updater which downloaded 2 updates and it have never frozen again in three months or so that i've been using it.
The good is very good. The bad is only so-so. 
2008-04-10
I've been using an e270 for several weeks now. When I opened the package and saw what I had and didn't have, I immediately went back on line, loaded the most recent firmware and the User Guide, ordered an $8 (including shipping) bundle that had a skin, a plug-in charger and a stretchy strap for running with it on(the last was unnecessary; I am a geezer and unable to run). After I loaded the device with some 50 CDs,a total of 807 cuts, I listened for a while and then ordered a set of Sennheiser CX400 earbuds. Now the setup sounds so-o-o good! And it is still less than half full. A couple of minuses: it was necessary to sync an album to the e270 a couple of times to transfer all the cuts on albums with more than 12 selections. And the directions are so generic you kinda have to figure out for yourself a lot of it. And I'm computer illiterate! I still haven't figured how to load photos and/or videos but all I want is good music, which the e270 has definitely given me.
