A first look at the Sandisk Sansa View

Intro

Despite a lengthy delay and complete redesign, Sandisk’s flagship PMP is finally hitting the marketplace. Introducing the Sandisk Sansa View. Gone are the face-hogging 4 inch screen and built in speaker, in favour of a simplified interface and a less dominating display.

Upside

One of our niggles with the Sansa E200 series interface was the way its face buttons were tucked up against the scroll wheel. They’re gone this time around. And while we’re no nearer to getting a touch sensitive wheel from any manufacturer outside of Apple, with the Sansa view we get the next best thing: A rotating scroll wheel with three clickable points, including “play/pause” and “menu”. Off to one side, the Sansa view even includes a standalone dedicated “home” button, but we have no idea what that function was inspired by.

The 16 gig View is certainly one of the larger capacity flash players on the market, especially considering its ability to accept additional micro SD cards to the tune of 8 gig. After some quick calculations, that puts Sandisk’s latest pretty close to the capacity of an HDD player, except with all the juice-saving benefits of flash memory.

That memory comes in handy when you’re talking up a player’s ability to run unconverted video. The E200 series’ video abilities blew chunks, in that it required large videos to be broken down into smaller pieces for outputting. That’s not the case with the View, so long as you’re looking at its natively supported formats of MPEG4, WMV and H.264. Then it’s just a matter of drag and drop, no software needed.

Downside

There’s no doubt that the View is a diminutive PMP. At its thinnest, it’s a mere 8.8mm deep, which is slim but not nano-slim. The thing is, with a 2.4 inch screen and its scroll wheel, in dimensions the View is approaching the size of an HDD ipod. Once you’re carrying something of that size, surely part of you wants the nearly limitless capacity that a hard disk gives. Especially if you’re all about video.

What’s more, on the View you’ll still have to use a converter to play your divx/xvid format video. Despite this popular format being natively supported on Zen players, that’s not the case here. All those ipod last-gen owners looking for an upgrade will also find that their AAC files are still not supported on the Sansa View.

But perhaps the most telling downside has almost certainly come at the expense of the slimline design. See, unlike the e200 series, the battery is no longer replaceable. “Sure,” you might say, “Ipod has never had an (easily) replaceable battery.” To that we reply, “but they do have a helluva lot more service centres where you can get that done.”

Outlook

With all this video functionality, it is telling that Sandisk chose to base the design around a 2.4” screen rather than the proposed 4”. When looking at the View’s closest competitor, the Creative Zen Digital Media player, it’s clear that Sandisk have opted to compete with the Nanos of the world rather than the traditional landscape format PMP.

To do a direct comparison, for twenty dollars more than the 8gig Nano you’re getting an expandable, slim line player with an FM radio, better quality audio, a built in microphone and a screen that’s larger than that of the ipod Classic. But that’s the problem. Most people are still going to see a far more heralded product at a lower price point. In addition, the sixteen gig version of the View retails at another twenty dollars more than the current-gen ipod Classic. Sure, $279 is a price point that should knock the Zen out of the water, but when you have your sights set on the Apple behemoth, costing less should surely be a priority.