Hands-on Review: SanDisk Sansa e280R

I love the Sansa SanDisk as an iPod alternative. I enjoy Rhapsody, the online music service, too. I love the thought of the two of them locking arms and taking on the iPod/iTunes domination.

Last week I attended an event sponsored by Best Buy, Real Networks (makers of Rhapsody), and SanDisk (makers of Sansa). Best Buy is confounding things a bit by offering what I can best describe as a private label of Rhapsody. This trio of companies loaned me the new SanDisk e280R to experience the hardware and service combination. And while I love most of what I'm experiencing, the few glitches have to do with having so many companies involved in the outcome.

The Player: SanDisk Sansa e280R

The Sansa is easy to love. It's smaller than a granola bar but holds 8GB of multimedia content. It's got a great main screen interface, an easy to read and navigate menu, and an absolutely lightning-fast scroll wheel for moving between your selections. In addition to music, photos, and video it also includes an adequate FM radio and a voice recorder. I love being able to babble ideas into this thing as I carry it around. And transferring music and video from your PC is fast and as easy as dragging and dropping files onto the device. The battery life is rated at 20 hours.

Rhapsody

The "R" in this SanDisk model stands for Rhapsody. The player has been tailored to use with the Rhapsody online service, which lets you listen to millions of songs for a single monthly fee. The new version, Rhapsody 4.0, is cleaner and a bit more elegant than the earlier versions of Rhapsody, which is appreciated by folks like me who are finding the new iTunes 7.0 an affront to the senses.

The way that Rhapsody music appears on your SanDisk is twofold. First, about 2GB of your music space comes prepopulated with Rhapsody music. It's great to hear something right out of the box without doing much work, though I can't say they nailed my taste in music too well. You can move any of the songs you enjoyed hearing to your personal library, where they stay for the life of your Rhapsody subscription, or simply ignore them. You can also subscribe to one of the channels that Rhapsody provides like "Slow Motion," "Country Hits," or "Alternative," and hear the prepopulated songs.

In both cases, you can rate the songs, read some fabulously detailed scrolling liner notes, and either elect to add them to your collection or not.

Best Buy

Now this is where I get confused. Best Buy is the provider of the Sansa's online store. The store is powered by Rhapsody. When you buy the Sansa at Best Buy you can listen to the prepopulated music for two months. Then the music will either disappear or you'll become a paying Rhapsody subscriber. Rhapsody has a number of plans and can be confusing to sign up for, so good luck. And the CD that came with the installation for my Best Buy store failed to find the network for the better part of a day before it inexplicably started working. (Network failure on the Best Buy side is my guess.) One of the nice things about the iPod/iTunes relationship is that there's only Apple to blame. Now if there's a problem, it may be hardware, service, or the online store that's behind it and it's difficult to know.

Really important: If you're a recovering iPod user, you can move your iTunes purchases to your new SanDisk. The disc that ships with the unit contains conversion software that basically looks to see that you've bought the song on iTunes and then converts the license to Rhapsody.

There's been lots of talk on various blogs, columns, and threads about how cool this service is, but there's also plenty mention of the little frustrations. James Kim shares his insights and so do the folks at Wired.

It's not a perfect world, and the Sansa CD that accompanies the purchase could do a slightly better job of explaining the Best Buy, Rhapsody, SanDisk triumvirate. That said, it feels great to be listening to new music (not my same old boring iPod) on a really spiffy MP3 player. Rhapsody continues to evolve as a great service. And Best Buy…well it's nice to know it'll have another revenue stream and that might keep hardware prices down. (The 8GB Sansa, after all, is only $219.)