Sansa Express

It really like the design of the 1.1 ounce Express. It's a 3 inch long, half inch thick black rectangle with a silver color plastic backing. The tiny 1.1 inch OLED screen shines through a translucent surface, displaying menu options and song information.

Also, the left side of the player houses a USB connector that can be covered by a removable cap. This means the player can plug directly into your PC without any cables, which is nice it's pretty much a pocket USB drive that doubles as an MP3 player.

The power button doubles as the menu button, and it's located next to the hold button on the top right hand side of the player.

On the bottom right hand side are the volume control buttons, and to the right of the screen, on the face of the player, sits a click wheel esque set of buttons for play or pause, skip, and navigation.

The headphone jack and expansion card slot are on the right hand side.

Sadly, the Express comes with crappy ear buds that fall out easily and don't produce great sound, but this is nothing new. As always, my advice is to replace them with a decent pair, such as the Shure SE210.

Once you do that, the audio quality is perfectly acceptable. Also included are a CD-ROM manual, a lanyard, a USB "extender" cable (that is inexplicably short), and some Sansa monster stickers that are not very useful (at least to me).

The player only plays MP3s, WMA, WAV, and protected WMA files, and it's easily loadable with Windows Media Player. The players 1GB capacity can store about 250 MP3s or about 500 WMA files.

The Music menu lets you search for artist, album, genre, song, playlist, recordings (FM or voice recordings you've made on the machine), or audio books, just as a good player should, and it also offers a standard array of music options (shuffle, repeat, and customizable EQ that recommend keeping flat).