Well, let’s start with the good news: the songs are pre-loaded by Sansa, so don’t fret about that! I actually like the bizarre hiphop song by The Shanghai Restoration Project. :smileyvery-happy:
Second, hardware version number. As a proud owner of two 4GBs…one version 1 and the other version 2…I haven’t seen any obvious problems with either (yet). Just let the auto-updater do it’s firmware work and see what happens.
Third, my newer black unit just came from the BestBuy Thanksgiving sale, and I wondered the same thing: HOW LONG HAS THIS BEEN ON A SHELF??? That’s a difficult question to answer, but let me attack it by going into some lithium-ion mumbo-jumbo: though I am especially skeptical of battery advice that I get online, the one bit I tend to trust is “fully charge the battery, then run it as far as you can…and repeat a few times”. The argument as I see it is to run a few full battery cycles to “break in” the battery, and then it should behave. This advice–in particular–is frequently mentioned on the View forum where battery life seems painfully short for some.
-Matt
