From: Julian Toler <juliantoler_at_googlemail.com>
Date: Sun, 1 Jul 2007 10:02:22 +0100

Quote:
* Can you recommend the sansa player? Is the sound ok? Are there some
drawbacks that one should know about?

Rockbox is so much better than the Sandisk firmware for these reasons IMHO:
1. Boots very fast
2. Can be set to boot straight into playing the last thing you were
listening to (as I use mine mainly for long podcats, this is a great feature
- just hit the on button and put the earplugs in)
3. Desn't need to re-scan the database every time it boots - on larger
memory Sansas this takes an age with lots of music.
4. fast forward and fast rewind are adjustable in speed - and are a million
times faster than the Sansa original (again - for 1.5 hour podcasts, trying
to scan through them was a right royal pain with Sansa firmware but is a
breeze with Rockbox.
5. Great plugins - e.g. text reader is great - keep a copy of your address
book for emergencies, load up an ebook if you are really sad ;-) - I
personally think the screen is too small to make this a pleasant experience,
but it works well for my address book
6. loads and views JPEG images instead of the pathetic BMP images on the
Sansa firmware. JPEG files are so much more space efficient - so you can
have larger zoomable images without wasting all your memory

Negatives:
1. the MPEG player is not really workable - no fast forward or re-wind and
rather jerky, but at least the MPEG files have better compression than the
MOV files used by the original Sansa firmware/movie converter. So at least
you can take your choice - boot into the Sansa firmware and play smooth but
larger video clips, or run slightly jerky MPEG clips on Rockbox without
forward backward buttons (but it does remember yopur place if you want to
break and resume later).
2. occasional crashes - nothing serios as it re-boots so quickly.

Overal, I am so impressed by what Rockbox has done to make this already
great "anything but iPod" device even greater.

Cheers
J
Received on 2007-07-01