Review: Sandisk Sansa Clip portable audio player

A stylish music player on the cheap

The Sansa Clip is about the same size as the Creative Stone and but is rectangular and includes a removable belt clip as standard.

A 1in four-line display shows tag information (the artist and title of the playing song) and along with being able to play digital music files it includes an FM radio and voice recorder. The recorder can also be used to save radio broadcasts directly to the player's internal memory.

At 2GB this is enough for a nice collection of music, transferred either by dragging and dropping it in Windows or using Windows Media Player 11, which can also be used to build playlists of your favourite songs. In addition to MP3 it can also play WAV, WMA and audiobook files. All of these features are accessed and controlled using the simple directional pad.

A Home button returns you directly to the main menu and there's a side-mounted volume control, all of which, along with the clear, adjustable display, make the Clip easy to use. Ratings can be added to songs (so you can build a list of favourite tracks) and a Go list allows for on-the-fly playlist creation (creating a playlist while other songs are playing).

There is also an equaliser for tone control, with several presets and a custom setting. The FM radio automatically scans for and stores up to 40 stations. There's no support for RDS, which shows the station name, so you'll have to remember the frequencies of favourite stations.

We were impressed by the clarity of the audio and pleasantly surprised by the quality of the supplied headphones, which are significantly better than those supplied with other models in the Sansa series. We gave the Clip a workout with a set of Shure SE210s as well, to see what it was capable of, and continued to be impressed: it's clear and loud enough to get the most from your music.

The Clip certainly isn't as stylish as the Zen Stone or iPod Shuffle, but it performs well, includes nice features and is cheaper than either.