Sansa are easy to use, but not great on battery life. Ipod has great battery life, but everything is converted to aac format and sansa uses regualr mp3.

Got my mom a smaller one for Christmas last year. She loves it.

I grabbed one of these earlier when this deal popped up, I love it.

It supports a lot of formats, and the 2.4" screen and 8GB of storage is pretty sweet for a player in this price range. FM tuner is a nice touch and the interface is good. Only flaw is you have to manually install the latest firmware to get rid of a few bugs with the old firmware, and the rewind speed is too fast.

Some people are working on porting rockbox to it, but no real idea how long that will take.

Why does someone always have to try to compare these to ipods..

Specs state a very high battery life, and I have yet to have a problem with battery life on any of my sansas.

does sansa still have slow boot up time?

#5

3 seconds cold boot.

i had a sansa e200 series.. took around 30 sec-1 min to boot.. thats why i'm wondering x.x

On the e200 series, I've noticed that "boot time" (by which I mean from when you turn it on to where you can actually do something with it) can be affected by whether or not you have a microSD card installed. If a microSD card is installed, it wants to recatalogue all the music on the card, which can take a while.

I've been seeing reviews that this product locks up on occasion. Any truth to this?

Best priced 8gb player out there hands down. I have one of these and it works wonderfully.

The real question that I have...is why are there so many SanDisk units showing up as refurbished?

Battery Hog when using video. Other than many great features for the price. Screen scratches very easily. Need to stick on a screen protector or buy a plastic case. These protectors are readily available through ebay vendors.

refurb, still a decent deal

I don't know, I've had the Sansa View for quite a while now, and I have a few problems. Anyone that has any help with any of them, let me (and any prospective owners) know.

I'm having nothing but problems putting videos on it. I've tried WMA and MP4 (both are listed as supported formats), but none of the videos will play - the audio comes out (WMA audio is fine, MP4 audio is garbled) but it does not play the video. The best part, I even tried using their POS software converter, and the player gives me an error of an "unsupported video format" - from their converter.

On top of that, I'm having other problems putting all of my music on it. You cannot put a lot of music onto it and try and play it all - the player will lock up for about a minute before it loads the next song's data. Sometimes the song plays, sometimes it doesn't; either way you lose control of the player until it refreshes. Even trying to scroll through the lists of artists, albums or songs will lag after about halfway down.

I'll be trading my Sansa View in for a new Zune sometime this week - I'm tired of the issues with it. It's inexpensive, but for a reason.

Sounds like you didnt update the firmware or just had a bad unit. As far as the converter goes, I use Any Video Converter instead anyways since it's fast, simple, and gives you a lot of options.

I have the 2gb e200 and I don't have nay problems with the battery life, I use the software that came with it to load the videos. My unit was also reburb, but I haven't had any problems so far...had it for about a year now.

I tried using Xilisoft Video Converter - I used all 4 types of MP4 (iPod, MPEG-4, and Sony) and 2 types of WMV (Windows and FFShow) from that converter with no luck. Just checked and the firmware is up-to-date and I'm using the latest SMC version too.

Is there anything else you're doing? Is your device in MSC mode and you drag-n-drop or do you use SMC to transfer the video files?

I find Magic Video as best converter. There are certainly issues with Sansa View and the firmware that comes with it. Update of firmware is no guarantee. Sansa View is not anything like Sansa say e280 which has good battery life. e280 is the 8 gig version of the e200 line. You can watch one movie (2 hour length) on one charge for the Sansa View vs 3 for the e280 model. No charger comes with Sansa. You can get an inexpensive car/home charger adapters at meritline.com. Here you are comparing 8 gig to 8 gig models. I own both models. The SMC video converter works for both models. Why are there so many refurbished units? Freezing of the videos during playback is an additional issue, you have shut down and the resume feature will bring you back to the point that you are watching. These are great recorders for recording your voice messages and transmitting them back to the sender when you answer them back. I do enjoy these units and you should not be discouraged by these minor setbacks, which I believe is curable with future firmwares.

#17...sounds like you're about to trade in your View, but...I've had 100% success with Any Video Converter (AVC). If you're still interested, try the settings described at the Sansa forum:

http://forums.sandisk.com/sansa/board/message?board.id=view&thread.id=6068

I've got a 16GB refurb (Overstock) which has locked up once or twice, but otherwise behaves itself. Depending on the song, it approaches the Clip in sound quality. The screen does scratch easily. Also no problems with a 4GB SDHC microSD (not sure how that lowers battery life though).

Had two of these both of which with micro cards that popped out during normal use. Need a cap or something to prevent accidental ejection.