the one with the mini sd card slot?, if so what do you think?

I've had an 8G one for about 10 weeks now. It has it's good points & bad.

Short answer, yes i'd buy another. For the price & it's size i can live with the niggles.

Long answer ….

I use almost exclusively with music encoded as flac. Headphones are Shure SE420's.

Sound quality doesn't come close to my trusty old iRiver H40 running rockbox, which i still use, now upgraded with a 120G drive & a 26 hour battery. Out of the box the Clip+ sounded, well, a bit lifeless. Using the EQ i've got it to sound acceptable, but still not close to the iRiver. Couldn't say about comparisons to anything else – i'm not an Apple fanboi & never used an iPod etc.

Convenience is it's big winner. The thing is tiny. It easily clips to things & you don't notice it's there. It's great for running, which is what i mostly bought it for. Situations where the brick like iRiver is too big.

Battery life isn't quite as good as advertised, i assume because i'm using the EQ. It'll happily go for a day on a charge & it'll charge easily on a laptop if it starts to run low when i'm out & about. Recharge time is surprisingly good – about an hour i think.

I don't use playlists. I normally select a directory of files & expect it to play them in alphanumeric order as any other player i've used. Sometimes it seems to have it's own idea of what order to play tracks in. Annoying for a continuous mix split into multiple files. I've not done much investigation into what order it is playing & this might well be down to the version of id3tag i label my ripped music with.

It doesn't take much pressure on the external SD card to make it think it's got a new card. When that happens it'll rescan the card & pause the track that's playing. This happens more often than i would like. The SD card & the volume control both extend from the case by the same amount & have a similar feel.

USB transfer speed isn't full USB2 – seems to be about 9MB/s. I keep music that i never replace on the internal storage & use the external SD card for stuff i swap about. The ability to plug the SD card into a card reader that transfers at full USB2 speed is very handy.

I've only used the radio a couple of times & that seems to mostly work.

EDIT: as a USB device it appears as normal mass storage so you treat it any other USB drive. You don't need special drivers etc & it doesn't use any DRM.

excellent review grahamb, i want something to replace my old creative as it's not compatible with vista and updates won't come as it's no longer made, making playlists etc not possible, not a fan of apple either, mostly use a player via the car stereo as in ear phones irritate me after about 10 mins, i like the fact it can take the soon to arrive 32mb card too

I've not tried using mine in the car, i use the iRiver which has proper line out. I assume the headphones only output will work with the car's audio system. Let me know if you want me to see if it works/how it sounds, i'm happy to give it a go.

I doubt you'll have any trouble with it with Vista. As i said, it appears as bog standard usb mass storage, so you won't have any of that hassle about lack of drivers, & you can use any playlist creation tool.

I'm linux only here & it works fine out of the box on that.

cheers, yea headphone to audio system direct cable link

I just bought a sansa clip 8g.

It's fine. I wanted cheap and something I won't mourn when I break it, but I needed a buffer between me and the "bus ****" who spoil my journey and early morning reverie. Really, basically, people who use the bus are the lower classes, and to be frank, its clear why. Most of them just don't actually know how to behave, whether it's spending the whole 40 minutes bellowing ino a mobile phone right behind me, or playing music on ipods or phones either through a speaker, or with headphones which allow enough noise leakage the whole bus has to "enjoy" what is inevitably dull tedious female histronic wailing r&b or angry "nigga's wid attitude" rap.

Its a neat little unit, radio works no worse than any radio in a phone I've ever used previously, sounds ok (I've nothing to compare to), the files transferred across more quickly than I was expecting, literally a few seconds for an album, the display although small is very clear. Its neat, and cheap, ideal for mtb'ing cycling where an ipod is more likely to become damaged.

Going into the direct input in the car, the signal is quieter than the iRiver's direct out, even on full volume. It clearly requires a different EQ profile than the one i use for the phones. I'm sure with a bit of experimentation with EQ & tone settings it would be fine. Unfortunately (unlike rockbox) it doesn't have multiple EQ profiles so it would require changing each time you swap between outputs.

i use mine in the car and its a little quieter than my old creative but nowt the volume switch wont solve great little bit of kit as said above works like a usb on my vista no problem looking forward to 32gb cards at a decent price for a 40gb player the size of a zippo 🙂 battery last for ages if you dont use a memory card or eq settings good to know if your away with no charge option :-). Cant fault it for the money

cheers guys, ordered a 4Gb one from Play.com-£39.99 free delivery 🙂