SanDisk Sansa Connect (4 GB) MP3 Player

This will, I think, be a bit of a retrospective review rather than the sort of affair we're used to. Sandisk is, at the time of writing, in the process of phasing out the Sansa Connect in favor of their newer models (Fuze, View, and Clip) and as such the question is no longer "is it any good?" but "was it any good?"

The impetus for this -- and what may well be the draw, for a lot of people -- is that the Connect is outdated enough that it's starting to show up quite inexpensively at various retail outlets. Wal Mart, for instance, is currently flogging the Connect on ultra-super-double-secret clerance for (depending on locale) about 30 bucks. Which for what you get in the Connect is an outstanding deal.

This sort of price point seems to indicate that a retailer doesn't quite know what to do with a product; Given what the Sansa Connect does and the way it does it this isn't too surprising. Sandisk's first and only foray into wireless enabled MP3 players is a strange and wild beast.

To begin with, the basics:

The Sansa Connect was, is, and forever will be a flash based MP3 player fundamentally similar to umpteen others on the marketplace. It's got four gigs of built in flash based storage and as is traditional for the Sansa line also has a MicroSD memory card slot for expansion. It's got a nice big color screen and a mechanical scroll wheel that's been familiar to the Sansa line for quite some time. You plug it into your PC with the included (proprietary) cable, you transfer some MP3's over, and you play them. Mostly.

The Connect's big selling feature, however, is its wireless capability. Not only can it play music from its internal memory (or memory card) but it can also connect to the Internet via any available wi-fi network and pull down internet radio stations, let you buy music online straight from the player (no PC required), and do a couple of other nebulous, ill-defined internetish things. Sometimes.

There are, as you would imagine, a couple of caveats. And we'll explore those in due time.

To date the only other players that've been able to do this are Apple's fantastically expensive iPod Touch and Microsoft's much maligned Zune. This puts the Connect sort of on a league all of its own, without much to compare it to.

What we can compare it to are other member's of Sandisk's Sansa family, notably the venerable E2XX series, Express, Fuze, and View. I've always been a big fan of the various Sansa players because of their sound design, clever user interface, built in radio tuners, ability to connect to a PC as a plain old USB drive (a sensibility most MP3 players seem to lack), and expandable storage.

The Connect, however, misses out on quite a few of these features. Close inspection reveals that it's a Sansa pretty much in name only; The hardware itself is actually designed by Zing (a subsidiary of Dell, if that doesn't send you running for the hills immediately) with the branding and a couple of exterior design bits tacked on by Sandisk afterwards. This means there's an entirely different set of hardware under the hood compared to the rest of the Sansa series, the user interface is different, and quite a few features are missing. Despite all the gee-whiz folderol about Internet radio capability, for instance, the Connect lacks a regular FM radio tuner. Out of the box it does not support video playback (though a firmware update rectifies this). It cannot be used as a plain Mass Storage device, and must be loaded via an MTP compliant music program like Winamp, Yahoo Jukebox, or Windows Media player. Et cetera.

Other models in the Sansa line stand out as exceptionally competent music players. The Connect, by comparison, is sort of the opposite. Is there such a term as an incompetent music player?

The Connect sure tries.

Let's start with the most obvious function, which would be simply loading some MP3's onto the device and playing them. From the factory, the Connect has a sticker on the screen loudly warning to install the included software before plugging the player into your PC. Unfortunately, at least in my package, no software CD was included: Just a couple of advertising pamphlets and warning sheets. Undeterred, I plugged the player into my PC anyway and found that it does not present itself as a Mass Storage device (think USB flash drive) as my Sansa Express and Fuze can do. Instead, it presents itself as a locked-down "MTP" device. There is no way to make the Connect function in plain flash drive ("MSC") mode. Period.

Irritating, I thought, becuase this means I won't be able to plug the Connect directly into various USB gadgets I've got such as my car stereo (as I can do with my Express). But no biggie; MTP support is provided by Winamp, which is my music player of choice in Windows anyway.

As it happens, the Connect doesn't actually like to, well... Connect. PC connection is iffy at best, and the Connect very much likes to fall into a mode where it refuses to speak to the attached PC without a reboot of itself, the PC, or both. I was able to make Winamp detect and upload to the device almost as many times as it crashed or failed to connect, and I could not make my installed version (10) of Windows Media Player work with the device at all. Various dances of unplugging, replugging, restarting, and cursing sometimes seemed to cure connection problems.

Once connected, music can be uploaded to the player via the MTP compliant software of your choice. When it's working, Winamp shows the Connect under "Portables" in its media library and uploading music to it is as easy as right clicking and selecting "Send to: Sansa Connect."

So far, so good.

The Connect is capable of displaying album art along with its music. The latest version of Winamp at the time of writing will automatically send along cover art if you've got it along with your MP3's. I keep a "folder.jpg" of each album's cover art along with my MP3's, and these were uploaded correctly when I sent along my music.

If you do not have an MTP compliant program that handles cover art you'll get ugly pastel disk icons next to all of your albums and tracks. It's worth mentioning that even if you get the proper cover art later there is no way to upload it to the player separately or associate it with an album. You have to physically delete the album from the player, situate your cover art on your PC, and then re-upload the entire album.

The Connect is also apparently capable of displaying icons for each artist, as well, but I can't figure out how to make this happen.

Once some music is finally on the device you can set about playing it back. When it's not eating electricity to power its wireless hardware, the Connect is rated for "12 hours" of battery life, but in reality it gets something closer to 8 or 9. This is none too exceptional, but tolerable if you remember to recharge every night. The Connect comes bundled with a wall wart power pack bearing a USB port on the bottom, into which you're meant to plug the included data cable to charge when you haven't got a PC handy (or turned on). Also, unlike most modern members of the Sansa family the Connect does not have a replaceable battery, and to date no battery from any other device has been found to be suitable for the Connect, even for the hardware hackers in the audience. Lithium ion battery lifetimes are typically as short as three years; When the internal battery of the Connect dies it is unlikely that any replacement will be available, especially since Sandisk has already disavowed nearly all knowledge of this particular model.

Sandisk's seeming refusal to acknowledge the existence of the Connect on their website is particularly troubling. This makes troubleshooting the player a pain as it goes unmentioned in most of Sandisk's support literature. For what it's worth, up-to-date versions of the Sansa Firmware Updater and Media Converter do work with the Connect, though the player is not listed in either utility's documentation. There is also a "Recovery Tool" available specifically for the Connect which can rescue it from borked firmware updates and hard crashes, as well as update the device to the latest firmware if no wi-fi connection is available. (One of the neat features -- arguably the only neat feature -- of the Connect's wireless capability is that it will automatically pull down firmware updates over the air if it is connected to a wi-fi network. Which is actually damn nifty.)

As stated, the Connect's user interface is markedly different from all other Sansa players. The Home button brings up a sort of overlay menu, which appears over whatever else is going on. There, you can pick "Now Playing" to jump back to the familiar what's-going-on screen, go to "Internet Radio," "Music Library," "Photos & Video," or "Settings." The scroll wheel performs all navigation functions but I think the way it handles the main menu is backwards. The menu looks like a slice out of the top of a wheel. The icons on it sort of rotate by as you select between them, except rotating the scroll wheel left makes the "wheel" on the screen go right, and vise-versa. As a programmer, I understand that you're shifting the invisible cursor left and right, not rotating the wheel left and right, but novice users will probably miss this concept and scroll the wrong way all the time.

Playback from the player is, refreshingly, just fine. It can drive headphones quite loudly, has all the usual pause, skip, page, shuffle, and repeat functions, and has two dedicated volume buttons on the side. Album art is displayed while the machine is playing (if available) which is a nice touch. If you haven't got headphones connected the player actually has a little built-in speaker on the back, and will play your music out loud. The speaker is no better than the speakerphone from a small cell phone, but it's a nice touch.

Music on the device is automatically sorted according to artist, album, and genre in a manner we've become accustomed to with most MP3 players. The Connect uses your MP3's tagging information to do this and is not capable of fetching tag information from the Internet, so if your tags are wrong the player will sort your songs all weird. It can use its Internet capability to look up more information on albums and artists, offer to sell you related stuff, and so forth but only for music downloaded from its included online service, and not from music you put on the player yourself.

Yes. About that online music service.

The Sansa Connect is inextricably tied to Yahoo! Music (that's the only time I'm going to type it with the exclamation point) just as the iPod is tied to iTunes. Through Yahoo Music you may sign up for an account and download songs straight to your player (for a price) or listen to a small selection of Internet radio stations for free. The Connect has no capability to connect to any other music service, which is both braindead and infuriating. Yahoo Music certainly isn't bad, as online music marketplaces go, but it's also not the best and it might not be everyone's cup of tea. The player is quite strongly branded with the Yahoo logo, bearing one right in its main menu (highly irritating) as well as other places.

The marriage to Yahoo Music somewhat troubling for other reasons. For instance, Yahoo may just decide one day to discontinue their service or to discontinue support for the "old" Sansa Connect, as has been done by companies many times before. This will render the Connect's wireless capability entirely useless. If you call this paranoia, consider that Yahoo has already dropped the Internet radio service that the Connect uses, though they eventually handed it over to CBS. Internet radio still works on the Connect for now, but it is both buggy and slow, routinely dropping out or failing to connect, and running with an extremely limited selection of stations.

To use the Yahoo service you're going to need a Yahoo sign in. The one you probably already use for instant messaging will do just fine for listening to the Internet radio stations, though you'll need to cause some money to change hands if you want to actually download songs to the player via the service. When connecting for the first time you'll be prompted for your username and password, which must be entered via the scroll wheel in a manner reminiscent of entering in your name after a high score on an arcade machine. You have to handle entering WEP keys for wireless networks this way, too, which is hugely annoying.

Once signed in you'll find that even with perfectly sufficient signal strength and a fast Internet connection the radio stations don't actually work very well. In my experience, there is about a 50/50 chance of the player failing to connect entirely and just timing out. Once you do connect, the stations very frequently stutter, pause, or stop for tens of seconds at a time to re-buffer. Next to useless. Where is our FM tuner, or better still our digital HD Radio tuner?

The lack of ability to connect to any streaming media source other than the built in Yahoo/CBS one is quite troublesome. The Connect is advertised and sold as an open-ended, connected, all-singing-and-dancing Internet enabled thing, and really it's not. Its Internet capability is a one-trick pony even when it is working today (and it frequently isn't) with no room for expansion, customization, or choice.

It gets worse. Depending on how you uploaded your personal music to the player (that is, MP3's you've already got on your PC) it is perfectly possible that the Connect will refuse to play uploaded music as long as you've got music you bought via the Yahoo service in memory. Why? I have absolutely no idea. But it seems that using a non-approved MTP program (such as, say, just about anything running on a non-Windows OS like Mac or Linux) causes the player to throw this conniption.

In the end, the Connect is a box attached to a long list of can'ts. The sheer number of lockdowns, no-choice services, features left out, and braindead interface decisions makes the Connect feel less like buying an MP3 player and more like buying a contract cell phone. Do you want to stream from Shoutcast, Icecast, or any other Internet radio service? You can't. Do you want to download or sync music wirelessly from your PC? You can't. Do you want to browse the web? You can't. Do you want to listen to FM radio? You can't. Do you want to connect as a Mass Storage device? You can't.

This coupled with the bulk of the player, mediocre battery life, unrepalceable battery, and lack of interest or support from Sandisk make it a real straggler. If it weren't for the steadily dropping clearance prices for this player I'd give it a total miss altogether. If you're hypothetically forced to pay full retail for any player I think your money would be much better invested in a Sansa Fuze than the Sansa Connect.

The most irritating thing of all is the sheer potential the Connect represents, which Sandisk cheerfully dropped on the floor. It's been confirmed that the Connect runs an actual, factual version of Linux under the hood and its poor battery life is a direct result of some of the fantastically powerful hardware that has been shoehorned into the player's little casing. The user interface is .NET on top of Icebox, for crying out loud, which makes the Connect less akin to an iPod and more akin to a little tiny notebook computer with wi-fi, just begging to be upgraded into something that's actually useful.

Sandisk, unfortunately, has displayed no interest in making the Connect useful beyond it's limited, tied-to-Yahoo scope. The Connect is a machine that coulda been a contender: It could have the ability to connect to third-party Internet radio, it could have wireless sync capability, it could have wireless sharing capability, it could have browsing capability, it could have better connectivity, a better interface, and more extensibility. In short, it could be everything that the Zune turned out to be, but it isn't. And with the discontinuation of the model it seems unlikely anything will ever come of the Connect's squandered, underutilized processing power and wireless capability, which is a real shame.

If you're looking for a first MP3 player or an only MP3 player, I'd give serious second-thought to buying a Sansa Connect. Yes, once you get it connected and working it is a thoroughly capable little MP3 player that can handle video playback (with the latest firmware update, uses the same format as the video capable iPods), album art, and memory expansion. But its battery life is sub-par, its wireless gimmick is next to useless, and support for it is rapidly dwindling to nothing. If you can buy one for a couple of pennies on the dollar it might make an interesting plaything, backback fodder, or a cheap and disposable player to give to the kids. But beyond this, I'd give it a pass if I were you.

Buy a Fuze or a Zune or even an iTouch, but don't buy this with any great expectations.