After 2 days my brand new Sansa Express emitted a high pitched whine, shut down and never came back on. Hard reset didn’t work. Both computers failed to recongize it. The firmware updater crashed, then insisted on MSC which the Express doesn’t do. Back to Amazon for a refund. Not a replacement. A refund. SanDisk where is your quality control on this one? The failure rates are piling up. I gave you a shot, but its back to Creative for me. You have lost my MP3 player business.
Sorry to hear about the bad experience ^_^. I’m sure there are people with the oppisite side to that story out there. Just my opinion. but I believe the failure rates are not even close to piling up. Hope we can see you around posting productive post and contributing your knowledgeof mp3 players and how the work to the forum ^_^.
Failure rates not piling up? My analysis is far from scientific, but consider this…
Of 49 current reviews of the Express 1GB & 2GB on Amazon.com, 15 cite device failure. Not freezes or firmware glitches. Hardware failure.
15 of 49 is over 30%
That is terrible. Nothing to be positive about there.
@zen wrote:
Failure rates not piling up? My analysis is far from scientific, but consider this…
Of 49 current reviews of the Express 1GB & 2GB on Amazon.com, 15 cite device failure. Not freezes or firmware glitches. Hardware failure.
15 of 49 is over 30%
Indeed, far from scientific. Your analysis assumes that every user who purchased one posted a comment on Amazon.com. Typically when a consumer like myself has a negative experience with a product, they are more likely to share their experience with others than if they were satisfied. This will skew the results towards a slightly negative bias. I am not saying that this model doesn’t have a few units that failed (any product will have a few bad units), but you can’t always rely on consumer end reviews to determine failure rates.
With that said, you could say the amount of threads regarding issues posted here as opposed to threads created just stating they have no issues would indicate that the failure rate is 100%, which obviously isn’t true.
The only people who know the true failure rate would be SanDisk, but I don’t think they will post how many units were sold and how many were replaced altogether :).
Jake, you are correct on the reporting issue - in the retail world it is often said that a satisfied customer will tell 2 people while a dissatisfied customer will tell 9. But given that this rule applies to all products reviewed, it is possible to successfully analyze and compare results of consumer reviews from one MP3 player to another, and get a fairly accurate statistical analysis of product success or failure in the end-user arena. And from my analysis I can tell you in the early months, the Express is fairing poorly.
