SanDisk Sansa Clip+
It’s a common situation in the tech world to be confronted with more or less the following choice: compact, basic and cheap; or larger, full-featured and expensive. So it is with portable music players and Sandisk’s 8GB Sansa Clip+ (which replaces the old Sansa Clip) sits firmly in the former camp. No, it’s no iPod in the looks department, and it doesn’t play video, make phone calls with Skype, or connect wirelessly to the internet either. But what it does do – offer a compact and exercise-friendly way to store and play your music on the go – it does very well.
Let’s go back to the beginning. For starters, why does this range of portable music players include the word ‘Clip’ in their names? That would be because they have a clip at the back, perfect for attaching the device to a collar or waistband before a run or a vigorous session at the gym. It’s a basic but useful feature in smaller portable music players. Together with dimensions of just 2.2 x 1.5 x 0.6 inches, it makes the Sansa Clip+ an eminently gym-friendly portable music solution. iPod Touch and iPhone owners, eat your hearts out.
Even better than that is the Sansa Clip+’s sound quality. It’s excellent, and paired with a decent pair of in-ear headphones it’s next to impossible to fault. It’s good enough to make even audiophiles happy. Further, support is included for an impressive variety of audio file types including FLAC and OGG, and it also has a built-in FM radio tuner.
The control system on the Clip+ is simple but effective, with the classic ‘square-shaped control with clickable sides and a button in the middle’ that is much beloved on portable music players. The OLED display has room for just four lines of mono-chromatic text (one yellow, three blue), but that doesn’t present any problems when all you’re doing on it is browsing your music collection and selecting albums and tracks. A dedicated volume control on the side of the device is another simple-but-effective feature that some of us miss in this age of touchscreen wizardry.
Rounding out the feature list of the Sansa Clip+ is something a little more unusual, and that’s a MicroSD card slot. The slot lets you to add up to 32GB of extra capacity to your Sansa Clip+, allowing it to compete in terms of space with the big boys of the portable music world.
So to recap, in the Sansa Clip+ we have a portable music player that is: compact; easy to use; expandable to 32GB; gym-friendly, and blessed with amazing sound quality. And that’s not all. Perhaps the best news is that at $61.95 (on Amazon), you could buy one for yourself and one each for three of your friends and still have spent less than if you’d bought a single iPod Touch instead. It truly is unbeatable value, and that fact alone will draw many customers who don’t need or can’t afford a pricier portable music player.
