After deciding I hateed the UI/formfactor/crappy workmanship on my 1gb (was sold as a super cheap 8gb but that was a deceptive fake!), I kept my eye out for a replacement! Last week Wootoff, had a
Sandisk Sansa e250 MP3 Player 2GB http://preview.tinyurl.com/2atdpn super cheap so i picked one up, under $40 with shipping
Its nice, it fits well in a hand or a pocket, it feels really sturdy, and its pretty powerful (and upgradeable with microSD cards).
I used it for about 3 days, and found i didnt like several things about it,
#1 Proprietary charge/sync cable (same connector as a ipod but totally different pinout)
#2 very slow to boot, takes nearly 25seconds to boot.
#3 proprietary video format, (have to use a converter!)
#4 no pitch control (i listen to lots of lectures, audio books and radio shows, it takes less time to listen to them when they are faster)
#5 no bookmarking. (same as above, ebooks/lectures/radio shows are sometimes not chopped into chapters)
but we often learn that you cant always get what you want.
Researching to see if anyone makes a ipod accessory adapter for the sansa, I found that someone ported rockbox to the sansa line. http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/WhyRockbox its an open-source mp3/jukebox OS.
So I downloaded it, and flashed it into the bootloader and copied the files to the player and booted it up.
it looked pretty smallfont/txt interface ugly.. but it booted and worked. I then grabbed a couple of skins and fontpacks, and icon sets and it looks pretty good.. it fixed nearly all of my problems except #1
It now boots fast, supports 15 audio file formats, does bookmarking, pitch control, plays several video file formats it comes with a ton of games and extras (including Doom!, asteroids, chess, oscilloscope and robotfindskitten) most of it settings and UI are skinnable/editable
My only complaint is, its pretty beta, not everything is controlled the same ways with the 7 buttons+scrollwheel, some things lockup, and USB sync is now kinda broken, (although as a workaround if you plug it in when powered off it boots the old os, and is fully supported as a flash drive, when unplugged ti reboots around to rockbox)
Neat extra, it can detect when its in my car charger and pause the music when i shut off the car! it will even start playing again when I start the car back up if it has not hibernated. pretty sweet!
I can also see real time cpu/memory/codec info, im going to be poking/playing with this for a while to come, I'm so much more happy with it now!
