My fifth Clip Plus just stopped working (after a month and a half), so I tried a Clip Jam, but the Jam has a bizarre feature - when I use the forward or back button, I’m tossed into a new book! Why would I want to skip from book to book? The Jam is like the Zip in that the buttons are designed to constantly get hit by accident (i.e. so big that they go all the way to the edge), but at least with the Zip, if chapter mode was turned off, then a quick press of the forward or back button didn’t do anything. Given how easily the buttons get hit, no change is much better than jumping to a new book.
[One bright spot, though: when you get slammed into a new book and then use the back button to return to the earlier book, at least it goes back to where you were.]
Also, it cuts off book titles so that, in many cases, I literally am not allowed to see which part of a multi-file book should come first. For my current book split into three parts, I watch for a gut-wrenchingly long time as the title plods past at a snail’s pace, and when it finally gets to the end, it says Part - and then it starts over, so I still don’t know if it’s Part 1, Part 2 or Part 3. Moreover, I can only see that much of the title after I’m already listening to the book - while scrolling up or down the list, it always, always, always blanks out and stops scrolling long before I 've seen most of the title. How am I supposed to read the entire title?
When I get to my list of audiobooks, it’s no longer ordered by book. A book split into three or four parts is no longer grouped together - each part is listed separately. This is especially problematic given that we’re not allowed to read the entire title in order to see which is Part 1.
And why is the menu set up so it takes even more steps to get to my books? I can get rid of other stuff on the menu such as Music and Folders, which is nice, but once I pick Books, then every time I have to select Audiobooks, and then Audible, just to finally get to the list.
The timing of moving forward or back within a file has changed, and I’m not sure yet whether it’s better or worse. With the Clip/Clip Plus/Clip Zip, the forward/back button had to be held down a long time to move just a tiny amount, but holding just a bit too long led to an unexpectedly large jump (I call that the hyperleap function). With the Jam, holding the the button down just a short time moves you quite a bit, so that it doesn’t appear possible to relisten to just the last sentence or so. Based on a few tries of each, the same length push seems to move farther by a factor of 10 in the Jam relative to the Plus (at least for short distances, before the hyperleap kicks in on the Plus; the forward/back on the Jam seems more linear). So, rather than making it easy to move around within a book, it will now be hard in a different way than it was before.
What I would really like is a button like the one on my Tivo remote that lets me jump forward or back by 30 seconds with each push. It would be even better if we could program whether we wanted the forward/back button to move us, say, 10 seconds, 30 seconds, 1 minute or to a new chapter.
There’s an underserved market here. I hope that Sansa will discover it and come out with a Clip Book version - every version since the Clip Plus has been worse for audiobooks.