Sansa m250 4.1.08E – Stick to autopower off
Apr 23rd, 2007 by Ian
Another trip, another couple audio books. I am happy to report that my mp3 player is stick kicking and I am still screaming – sometimes anyway. There are several annoying things that still plague this player.
The most annoying
If you manually power off, more often then not the player will turn back on demented. It will refuse to play, it will change the icon from pause to play but nothing will be heard. The most relieble way to get it back to an undemented state is to have it in play mode and rewind to the previous track, pause and then manual power off and power it back on. This will normally bring the player back to a useable state. In order to avoid demented play mode you should never manually power off the player and instead rely on the auto power off feature. Good news is that it never lost my spot though that might have been because I was still being careful not to manually power off the player.
Lesser sins
This was the first time I had filled the full 2 gigs of the player with tracks. After you load the files onto the player and detach it from your computer, the player rebuilds its database. Rebuilding of the database with 2gigs of files takes about 3.5 minutes – not too quick – even if you don’t make changes to any of the content any time you remove it from your computer expect it to take 3.5 minutes.
With 2 gigs of audio book files on my player there were over 1000 files. I had 3 audio books loaded and the book i wanted to listen to started at track 120. In order to get to track 120 I had to forward through 120 tracks – you’d think this would be a pretty easy thing to do. Each forward though a track takes 8 seconds, so I had to click the forward button 120 times waiting 8 seconds between each click. This turns out to be a 16 minute affair – ouch – good thing the book I wanted wasn’t at track 500!!
The price has dropped quick a bit since I bought it. I debated sticking to the 1gig player since the 2gig seemed a little more expensive than it should have been but I ended up getting it. I paid 42.99 pounds and two months later the price is 29.99 pounds – oh well hopefully I can stand this player till a better one comes out and reaches my price range. I think I’ll wait til a player comes out that is about the same physical size, takes AA batteries that give the player longer play time, and is 20-30 gig in size, oh and hopefully has decent firmware – though clearly I can live with substandard firmware as I still think this is the player that bets fits my needs.
what mp3 player do you have? sounds really sucky.
i know that they’re probably a little over rated and definitely overpriced, but i have found my iPod to be pretty much worth any of those faults. never once has it dissatisfied me.
i have a cardboard one outside my house, but what about glass?? doesn’t that get recycled here? i feel so bad throwing it in the bins. there must be a bottle depot or something somewhere.
Sandisk Sansa m250. The thing is that it has the features I need; the rant above is merely about the features that are annoying – hopefully sandisk will improve the firmware and fix these bugs. The features that I most wanted were
1. Physical Size – Small enough to fit in my front pocket
2. Battery Life – 18 hours
3. Removable Battery – AAA
4. 2 gig of storage for < $100 CAN
5. Needs to have display
I am mainly using it for audio books. I would not buy this player for music. I already have my shuffle for music and running and Oana has an ipod for car trips.
Glass
When we first arrived in Edinburgh we thought they didn’t recycle glass. After much research it turned out that individual houses can put out glass in their little recycle tubs. It is only the flat style accomodation that due to noise issues does not put large glass recepticle bins outside the buildings. There are recycle points for it, the closest to us is about 500meters away so we save our glass and make semi monthly trips. You’d think instead of not having a glass bin they’d just restrict the hours you can use it. As for enforcement I heard about a guy getting a huge fine for putting cardboard into the paper bin so if they can enforce that rule they can certainly enforce the noise issue.