Group test: Sandisk Sansa e260 portable music player

The Sansa e260 is a strong competitor to the iPod nano

While nobody has come close to improving on the classic simplicity of Apple’s iPod navigation, Sandisk has got the closest to emulating it.

Like all these players, the e260 uses playlist-based navigation to find and play a piece of music. It has a wheel that is used to cycle through lists of music and options. This is the only player in our round-up – in fact, the only player we’ve seen – to successfully emulate Apple’s scroll-wheel approach. It does this quite well, making navigating through song lists fairly simple.

Annoyingly, there’s no way to create a playlist while playing other files. It’s possible to add files to the Go List but only while playing a song. So unless the music files on the PC are already arranged into playlists, it’ll mean listening to whole albums on the go.

The other option is to go through each track in turn and select it, play it, then add it to the Go List. Only then is it possible to play the Go List itself, which is fairly annoying.

It’s the only player in our round-up that has the option to increase its capacity – it has a slot for micro-SD memory cards. These are starting to show up in high-end phones and are quite expensive, but in a year or so could provide an inexpensive way to get more space when the supplied 4GB is full.

The Sansa e260 can play video files, although these need to be specially converted using the supplied software. Music, on the other hand, can be simply copied to the device using Windows Media Player, or Windows itself. The e260 came neck and neck with Apple’s nano, and we simply couldn’t separate them – the first true rival to the daddy of portable music players.

This article is part of a group test of portable music players.
See also:
Portable music players
Apple iPod nano
Creative Zen V
Iriver U10
MSI P640
Sony NW-A1200
A table of features can be read via our pdf download above.