SanDisk Sansa M240 MP3 Player

Apple may have started a revolution with the iPod, but there are certainly a plethora of puppies nipping at its heals ready to conquer the kennel. I was overwhelmed with the attractive choices of styles, colors, and capabilities of MP3 players exhibited in booth after booth at CES. Let me tell you about one that is worth your attention. If you think of SanDisk as the expansion card company, expand your horizons, for it also offers an array of MP3 players now. The SanDisk Sansa M240 is the most versatile.

As an MP3 player, it is capable of using MP3 and the more condensed WMA format. With one gigabyte of internal flash memory, it can hold up to 16 hours or 240 MP3 songs or 32 hours and 480 WMA tunes. It will also play audio books from Audible.com.

An easy to navigate, user-defined menu allows you to organize and playback tunes by name, artist, album, track order, or genre. You can mark your favorite songs for easy recall with the tap of a button. Music can be downloaded from various online stores or ripped and transferred from CDs. It comes with a USB cable for transferring data and only works with Windows.

Not only is the M240 an MP3 player, it also is an FM tuner with 20 station presets. It is a digital recorder as well so that you can use it for taking audio notes while driving or walking, which I really appreciate.

It comes with a nice, comfortable set of 3.5 mm earbuds that actually stay in your ear. You can attach it to your arm with the plastic, see-through case that connects to a Velcro strap. Alternatively, there is a place to attach a lanyard so that you can wear it around your neck. Measuring 3 by 1 3/8 inches, it works well dangling around your neck.

Amazingly, it will play for up to 19 hours on a single AAA battery. Sometimes, instead of the earbuds, I plug in a Bluetooth transmitter and listen to it with my Plantronics headphones www.plantronics.com, and the quality is superb.

When I want to share my tunes and fill up the room, I plug it into the ThinkOutside Boomtube speaker system www.thinkoutside.com. I have also used it in my car by connecting it to an FM modulator and blasting over my car speaker system.

The M200 series comes in various sizes and corresponding prices. The M250 is 2 GB and costs $129.99. The M240 is 1GB and costs $89.99. Finally, the M230 is 512 MB and costs $79.99. Hmm…you can double the storage for just $10, which makes the M240 the best buy. Check it out on the SanDisk site where you will see a wide variety of MP3 players in addition to the m200 series. For instance, the e200 series is designed for music as well as video playback and can hold up to 6 GB of data.

While one gig of memory is plenty for me, and I wouldn’t know what to do with 40 gigs, I’m surprised that SanDisk chose to use a non-expandable flash memory format instead of a memory slot. With a slot for expansion cards, users would have infinite storage possibilities, and SanDisk would sell more expansion cards. See them all at www.sandisk.com.