After several rounds of “escalation” Sandisk has finally rendered a verdict on an audiobook bug that I and others have found. Basically, during playback of an Audible audiobook (I’ve demonstrated this now with 3 different audiobooks), there is a ever increasing delay in starting when playback is initiated with the length of the delay dependent on where in the recording you are starting from. For a 20 hour audiobook, the delay reaches abiout 45 seconds at the 19 hour mark. Even at the start, it’s a noticeable 2-3 second delay.
Sandisk claims this is a hardware issue which makes no sense to me at all. This has never happened with other designs (Fuze, Clip+, or Clip Zip). As usual, they have no idea if a future firmware update will address this problem and no clue as to when a future firmware is likely.