I bought an E380R - it never worked. I was on the phone to support for 10 months, naively, because the bottom line is, every time this thing stopped working, which it did every 6 - 8 weeks the whole time, support told me to reformat. Inevitably, since this was an 8 gb player, it then took me many days to get my music back on - each time!
Finally, I INSISTED that Sandisk replace the E380R - which basically never worked properly for almost the whole year. Sandisk FINALLY agreed to do so. (At first, Sandisk said “no” & claimed the E380R was out of warranty, but it was NOT, it had a 1-year warranty.) Sandisk said they would send me an 8 gb Fuze. Then they sent me another 380R. I sent it back unopened & they sent me a Fuze. This took many many weeks.
The 8 gb Fuze died after 2 1/2 months. (Beginning of Nov 08 to mid-Jan 09.) Per other consumer’s message on the Fuze section of this community forum, it had the exact same defective internal lcd screen, which had turned white with the same black inkspot & little red line (zero external damage). Clearly, this is a known defect.
I called support again, & was told to email them a photo of the dead screen. I did so & then the support dweebs said too bad there is no warranty any more.
I am an original Palm owner as well - my very first Palm Professional from 1997 still works if I put AA batteries in it! My 2-year-old Palm Centro works fabulously - as well as the day I bought it. I still use my 4-year-old original Palm Treo as an electronic phone book for our kitchen phone.
The bottom line being: Sandisk is pumping out junk. It doesn’t have to be that way, but the fact is that if there is no quality control and a certain percentage of defective junk goes out to the consumers, the company makes a bigger profit that way.
So I will no longer purchase any cheap Sandisk junk. Suffer, you Sandisk consumer-digits!
