No more Clip and no more Sansa for me!

MP3 players Sansa Clip | Clip+
1

So my Clip finally gave up the ghost over Christmas after several months of unreliable performance. 

I was so excited by this player after all the reviews i read but i guess you get what you pay for and in the end this thing is just too cheap to be good.

It started fairly tamely with just a few system hangs requiting resets but it progressed to failures to turn on for days as well as its final failure a broken screen.  I have had it a little over a year and i can say that performance in this time has been far from ideal. 

My reiew on about 15 months of ownership:

Pros:

  • great sound quality

  • expandable memory

  • Small and light

  • drag and drop functionality

  • cheap

Cons

  • poor battery life

  • poor build quality

  • poor sound volume even on Restof World Setting

  • unreliable

  • slow transfer rate

I was so excited to recvieve this player as i had read great things about it.  There is such a professional fan club online about the Clip that i thought i had stumbled across a relativley hidden gem.  Unfortunetly the hype isn’t true.  Yes the sound quality is greta and yes it is small and light and all at a very affordable price but it is far from reliable.  My Clip has not functioned seemlessly for more than 2 weeks at a time for the entire time i have had it, requiring some sort of hardware reset or computer recoonection to get it functioning properly again.  It is a shame as the package is so promising and you expect reliability from Sandisk but sadly this just isn’t really fit for purpose.

I am now left wondering if the reliability issues have been improved for the Clip Zip and thus should plump for that or whether it might be best to abandon the whole range and move to a completely different player.  All i can say is that i am not goign to get less reliability from any other player at any price point.  I am not an Apple fanboy but at least my previous ipod lasted five years with no issues!

2

Some people have had problems, but many thousands if not millions of these things have been sold. I still own an older Sansa M model, this is 1gb memory, uses a single AAA cell and has great fm, for which I still use it.

I had the original clip which did finally die but I got my money’s worth.

I have the clip+ now, no problems so far except a generic problem with fm. It drifts after turning on which I attribute to an internal heating problem. It’s easy to fix by tuning up then down (or the other way round). Usually this needs to be done twice then it seems ok. The fm reception is good, but the original M model was better.

You might scan through other posts, people seem to have some luck with resets etc.

As far as an alternate product, there are many on the market, but like all electronic gadgets, they will have their share of problems. Sansa are reported to be good on warranty exchanges, might be worth giving them a call.