Cheesy Quintessence

Yesterday I finally got my SanDisk Sansa e270, part of SanDisk’s fairly new e200 series of flash-based MP3 players. The e270 is notable for being the most spacious flash based player yet, at 6 GB, or up to 7 GB if the expansion slot is used. It’s quite a heck of a bargain, too, as it has a user-replaceable lithium ion battery, 20 hours quoted battery life, a scratch-resistant design, voice recording, an FM tuner, video playback, and a picture slideshow, and a fairly attractive design, for less than the cost of the 4 GB iPod nano.

Perhaps this all sounds too good to be true. Indeed, it has its shortcomings. It is a very nice music player overall, but since I don’t find it particularly innovative in many ways other than its feature set as described above, I’m just going to note my complaints:

• The wheel feels quite rough, and the middle button wiggles a bit. Doesn’t have a high quality feel to it, which is a contrast to the rest of the player.
• Nobody else has mentioned this as far as I’ve seen: the screen isn’t reflective at all; unless the backlight is on, it may as well just be blank, it’s so hard to see. This hold true even in direct sunlight.
• The wheel light always goes off after a few seconds of no wheel use, regardless of backlight settings. So, the wheel light is constantly turning on and off, rather annoyingly. I’d like to see a custom time for the wheel light, and the option to just disable it, as it’s useless.
• Leaving the now playing screen, including shutting down, when the player started with music paused causes it to forget what was playing. Avoidable by resuming playback before doing so.
• When shut off, it forgets where its volume was set. I wouldn’t mind so much if it didn’t set the volume too high.
• Certain functionality is difficult to get to. For example, to add music to the on the go playlist, you have to start it playing first. Also, there’s no way to directly browse all songs by an artist; you have to “play all,” then go to the playback list. Getting back to that list isn’t particularly intuitive either, as there’s no button to go up a menu level from the playback screen like there is from other menu screens (previous track is used to go up a level, and is used normally on the playback screen).
• The record button is quite easy to press and causes active music to stop playing.
• When browsing an artist’s albums, the album you select is saved so it can be remembered later. Unfortunately, it remembers this for all album screens. If you select Album 2 by Artist 1, then go to Artist 2’s album list, Artist 2’s second album, instead of the first album in the list, will be selected. This is fairly disorienting.
• A friend and I have both had issues with it “refreshing database” over and over. This takes forever for it to accomplish. I can’t figure out why it happens, but it seems to have something to do with certain stuff I put in the music library.
• In regard to the problem above, top rated songs seem to be lost when a refresh happens.

Obviously, nearly all these problems could be fixed with a firmware update. I’d be incredibly satisfied with the player if most of these issues were addressed. I’d have already contacted SanDisk with this list, but it seems there’s no technical support email address for the e270 in the US. Shame.