SanDisk Sansa View 16 GB Video MP3 Player (Black)

Despite the claims of the Best Buy salesman, the Sansa View is unable to play Audio Books from NetLibrary websites. It is not WMA compatible. I only wanted to listen to AudioBooks with this MP3 player, so it is now obsolete to me.

I think they forgot to put the decimal point in when they claimed a whopping 35 hours playback time. Mine got more like 3.5.

It didn't seem to be reverse compatible with my wall charger or my cigarette lighter charger. You plug it into them and it either shows the charging animation for a few seconds than goes out or doesn't show it at all. Which tied me to my laptop which sucked. The best I ever got when I timed it was 14 hours but as time went by this seemed to get worse and worse. It seemed every time I turned around it needed charging again. I actually returned the first one for this reason, and had the same problem with the second one. But getting 14 hours out of it decided not to return it also. (big mistake)

Locks up a lot playing simple mp3's

The fast forward button (not jog dial) only has one speed approximately 8x so if your trying to fast forward though a 1 hour podcast expect your finger to get pretty tired holding the button down. When this happens and you slip and push it again it changes modes to thinking you want to go to the next song so the 6 minutes you held down the button was for nothing now, start all over! I don't know how many times I've done this even knowing the problem it's hard to avoid.

Last the extra large screen is great! For viewing your menu's and what not, but it also makes the unit much more venerable to TOTAL DESTRUCTION! I was leaning up against a bench seat with it in my pocket and pushed the cheap plastic shield right into the fragile lcd display and totally destroyed it. After having done this I just pressed with my finger and it takes hardly a pound of pressure to push the protective clear plastic shield into the fragile led! If you have one of these DON'T CARRY IT IN YOUR POCKET. Buy a case and attach it to your belt.

I've had a few different Sansa, over the years, and have thought all of them to be great value(i.e. functionality for price). The View is no exception. One advantage to me, over e200 series, is that you can now drop regular .jpg's right onto the player, without the need for conversion(it resizes to fullscreen on player). mp3 sound quality is excellent, as always with sansa. However, it's my belief that capacity, functionality, and small/light package come at an unfortunate price in this case. The unit I received works perfectly, and I have no reason to believe it is faulty, but every half hour or so, particularly when skipping a song in random play mode, it pauses(freezes?) for 10-15 seconds before responding.(no matter which, or how many, buttons you push). Then, when it catches up, it executes any/all instructions you attempted to give it; which many times means doing something you didn't originally intend... out of frustration. Sandisk makes great products that fit the needs of tech savvy users(read: not Sony/M$ robots), but they should fully bake the product/code before releasing to market.

This is a well-priced product that performs in accord with its low price. In the few months having owned this product battery life, which started out strong as advertised, has now fallen to only retaining a charge for 2-3 hours.

Another annoyance about the the Sansa View is that it lacks an important basic feature needed for enjoying audiobooks - no bookmarking. It is surprising that Sandisk advertises this product as compatible with Audible's products, and indeed it is, but they failed to provide this most basic feature needed for maximum enjoyment of audiobooks. Many times the player failed to remember where I left off in a book - forcing a fast forward to search where I was. This is not too bad using Audible books, but if you're listening NetLibrary books a lack of bookmarking is a [i]fatal flaw[/i]. For audiobook listeners I recommend searching for a different product. Creative seems to know about bookmarking and provide that feature to some of their products.

Note: Out of the box, the product's fast forward feature was unusably slow for audio books, however, recent firmware upgrades seem to have adequately repaired this.

The on/off switch seems to not work quite often. The reason is that the unit needs frequent resetting (holding the on switch on for 10 seconds).

Another failing with this product is Sandisk's incomplete documentation and poor support on their anemic web site. Sandisk just doesn't appear serious about making and supporting an excellent product.

In summary I subtracted a star for the following points:
1. no bookmarking
2. poor battery life after a few months of use.
3. poor documentation and support.

If Sandisk would address these items I would feel the product worthy of a 5 star review.

I was just getting ready to plunk down my $$$ when I noticed that for all the improvements in screen size and capacity, the battery isn't replacable. Why would SanDisk do such a thing? It was what made the e280 stand apart from the others. Battery goes bye-bye, simply order another one, open up the back, pop it in and you're back in business. Great selling point, but the inability to install a new battery is a deal killer for me. As a SanDisk rep put it: "At this time, we do not have a repair faculity at all. Maybe in the future we will, but this is all undetermined. No way to resolve it, if the battery is dead."

The Sansa is a bit larger than the e200 series, but the extra screen size is worth it.