Sansa Rhapsody Player Launches Today

The Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg gives a thumbs-down to the new Sansa e200R Rhapsody player, a two-gigabyte would-be Nano-killer that's optimized to work with the Rhapsody music service (and which launches today). Since it uses Real's music formats instead of Windows formats, the $140 player will purportedly work more smoothly with Real's Rhapsody service (anyone who has ever had a subscription-song license on a portable player peter out on them while on the road knows why this could be useful). It's all part of a trend on the part of iTunes competitors to make their services more iTunes-like (read: smooth and glitch-free). The trend continues next month when Microsoft launches its music-service-specific Zune player.

Mossberg has quite a few complaints: The player is bulkier, heavier, and doesn't have an audiobook or podcast feature. It comes 50 percent preloaded with Rhapsody-chosen music, which is kind of useless for anyone who already has a fine music collection. But I'd be curious to see what tunes are preloaded—I'm pretty snobby when it comes to music, so it the selections would have to be original and unexpected. (As a music lover, I always wondered why anyone would ever want even those U2 Special Edition iPods that came preloaded with the Irish band's tunes.) According to the review, the service automatically reloads Rhapsody-selected new music whenever you sync up. This sounds like a music player for dummies.

I could live with all of these factors, particularly considering that Rhapsody has a fine online music service, and because I'm a fan of the stylish regular-issue Sandisk Sansa e250 that came out earlier this year (it's the same player, only it works with all the subscription services). My biggest beef with the "To-Go" subscription music services so far has been license-failure while at the gym or on a plane. I'll press play and get a message saying my license is no longer valid, making my entire "rented" music collection useless (and my treadmill run or plane ride a lot more boring).

As a Rhapsody user, I might actually benefit from this supposedly smooth-running device, preloaded tunes or not. I'll be test driving one of these babies soon and will post my hands-on findings I hope by next week.