June 2008: My Panasonic MP3 player is failing due
to the wear and tear of being carried with me everywhere, every day,
for a long time. It was a good machine.
I bought a Sandisk Sansa e250. It sucks for the following reasons:
- The Sansa e250 uses a proprietary USB connector. So you must carry
its bulky cable if you want to be able to transfer music to
the e250. Many other MP3 players either use a standard
USB connector or have a built-in USB plug. Nonstandard
connectors are employed invariably for the purpose of
exploiting consumers. It is just another kind of lock-in,
which is almost always bad for the consumer.
- The Sansa e250 ignores the directory structure
of its FAT filesystem. It builds an index if the MP3 files
based on their ID3 tags. My MP3 files are organized nicely
in directories, and many of them do not have ID3 tags. So
the Sansa doesn't know what to do with them. This might be
an idiot-friendly feature, but to be it just looks retarded.
- The Sansa e250 crashes when you unplug it in certain
situations (unmounted, of course). You can find lots of
discussions of this online. People say that they have to
reflash the firmware to get it to work again. What happens
is it enters a state of rebuilding its index (which it shouldn't
have at all), and it crashes during that process. And there
is no simple way to reset it, which is a violation of one of
the basic principles of digital design.
So the Sansa e250 is a piece of shit. I returned it and
bought an Archos 105, which works well and has none of
the e250's problems.