About a month ago we started running a contest urging readers to send in pictures of themselves and their portable (and sometimes not so portable) setups. The contest was a lot of fun with around 100 participants showing off a few hundred photos. The winners of each category have been chosen and the winner of the random drawing is shown below.

Thank you all that participated, we had a lot of fun with this one and it really showed off the creativity of our forum members. There were so many great entries, so please be sure to check out all of them in the contest forum.

I got a brand new 4GB silver Sansa Clip just hanging out here at abi>>headquarters, so I thought it would be best to find it a happy home. It has been one of my favorite players for ultra portable on the go use since it pair so nice with my Shure SE530s- it’s crisp sound in a small package.

So here is your chance to add something shiny to your on-the-go audio ensemble, but first we would love to see what you are using now. There will be several judged categories including, so no matter what you are carrying around, even a stock setup, you have chance of winning. Head over to the contest forum to check out the categories, examples, and official rules. Here is a chance to show off you gear!

The contest is now closed, and new entries will not be accepted

The Sansa e200 is one of the best selling budget players ever and that shows on the number of loyal users it has. The original firmware is buggy and somewhat limited, so when Rockbox was released on the player many people praised it. Now a new player has joined the game, SansaLinux.

SansaLinux is a port of iPodLinux, and only works with the V1 e200 players. It's still being developed, and so far LCD, audio and keys are working, while other features are planned or in development. It's always nice to see custom firmware for players, so hopefully this project will make it all the way through.

[SansaLinux]

Here is a teardown of SanDisk’s latest. The disassembly was straight forward being that the housing was held together by plastic clips on each side. Once inside, the removal of the LCD is just a matter of releasing it from a set of clips.

This may not be something you want to do for fun since it may not go back together as tight as it once was. So I would urge you to only use this guide as a repair reference if you are going to take the Fuze apart. Otherwise please enjoy this journey into the depths of the Sansa Fuze’s internals.

There was a gap that needed to be filled in the Sansa product line in between the Clip and the View. This gap was filled by the Fuze with a bigger screen, more capacity, and a memory slot compared to the Clip; but it wasn’t quite the flagship as the View with a lower resolution screen, smaller size, smaller capacities, and weaker video playback abilities.

Falling nicely in between the two the Fuze is a welcome member to the family with many improvements all around- even outperforming the View in some respects. If you would like the full scoop, read on, and I will break it all down for you.

SanDisk’s latest player the Sansa Fuze fits nicely in the family between the Clip and the View. How does the Fuze stack up? After just a few hours with the Fuze I can easily say that this is the best Sansa to date. The Sansa View was rushed to market and it shows in the details, but on the other hand you can tell that the Fuze got a lot more TLC.

The biggest improvement I have noticed is the snappier interface as you can see from the video below. The screen is also improved over the View and previous Sansas; it is more crisp and doesn’t suffer from that odd “shimmer” that e200 and the View had. Many of you have been curious to know if the sound quality is on par with great sounding Clip. So far I have been hard pressed to tell the difference on my Sennheiser HD650s (the Fuze does drive them to a comfortable listening level). However, I have only spend a few hours with it, so don’t hold me to it till the full review.

In the mean time, check some photos and video below.

We saw a few leaks and hints of the Sansa Fuze over the last week, but today SanDisk has officially announced this tiny flash player. The Fuze is a bit bigger than the Sansa Clip but packs in a 1.9” screen. As previously noted the player will feature 25 hour audio playback in the standard MP3, WMA, WAV, and Audible for Audio. It will also playback JPEG and 5 hours of MPEG-4 for video.

The player will hit store shelves early next month and come in 2GB, 4GB, and 8GB capacities selling for $80, $100, and $130 respectively. Additionally you can add more memory with the microSD memory slot.

Personally, I am pretty excited to see If the Fuze sounds anything like the Clip- if so it would be a pretty killer player. Now if they would only change that home screen and tweak some minor nuances of the UI.

Update: Gear Log has a video up showing off the Fuze. If you notice the Fuze has a slick looking glossy finish like the Clip and also carries the carries the same SOC. This does not necessarily mean it will carries the same sound quality as the Clip since its the sum of the parts that defines it, but it does give us hope.

[Product Page]

A few days ago we showed you the first glimpse of the Sansa Fuze after a forum member had been snooping around the Internet. The Sansa Fuze has now been spotted available for pre-order on Amazon, while there still has been no official word from SanDisk

As we speculated, the Fuze will have both radio and video, and it will also have a microSDHC slot for expansion and a 1.9" screen to view it all. Battery life is rated at 24 hours for audio and 5 hours for video. The Fuze is listed in both black, pink and red, and from the leaked accessory kit we know a blue version is also coming. The only model listed is the 4GB priced at $99, but we expect more capacities to be available once it's official.

[ Product Page via DAPreview ]

An observant forum member snooped around the new Sansa updater a few weeks ago, and realized a device named "Fuze" was mentioned in the about section.Today he googled around and came across a Sansa Fuze accessory bundle which makes the possibility of a Fuze in the works so much more believable.

From the looks of it, the Fuze might fill the gap in SanDisk's new product line between the Sansa Clip and the Sansa View. Size wise the Fuze looks to be something along the lines of the 3rd gen iPod Nano, and the design resemblance is also very noticeable. If this is a Nano competitor, I'm guessing we can expect up to 8-16GB memory, video playback and SanDisk's usual included radio.
No official word yet from SanDisk

The Sansa Clip recently proved that it's a better player than the iPod Shuffle in a faceoff here on abi>>. We won't let it rest however, as it's time for it to take on a stronger opponent, feature wise - the Creative Zen Stone Plus.

With both players being available up to 4GB (once the silver clip is released), and both of them featuring pretty much the same features from a technical point of view, this is set to be a much closer competition. Read on to see the face-off.

You iPod fanboys (fanboys not users) never cease to surprise and disgust me. Apple just announced a price drop on the screenless iPod Suffle. From reading your over hyped reader comments on Digg and Engadget you would think that your fascist leader crapped another bar of gold. But what you fanboys are missing aside from the basic reasoning skills are the other players that do not cloud your minds with a barrage of marketing; in other words, MP3 players that are smart consumer choices.

So with this news, I thought that this would be the best time to put the iPod in the ring with a smarter choice and show you that despite the price cut, the iPod Shuffle is still an overpriced shiny object.

The Sansa View is SanDisk’s flagship flash MP3 player with the ability to playback video on its 240x320 64k color screen. What makes the Sansa View interesting is its high capacity flash memory along with memory expansion putting it in close rivalry to hard drive based players. The other thing going for the View is the “bang for the buck” factor. It may not be a high end player, but it is one of the best values on the market.

Throughout the review I many times compare the View to the e200 because it is basically an updated and improved e200- in all the good ways but some of the bad ways as well. If you are looking to upgrade your e200 or are looking for an inexpensive player with a lot of features, read on to see if the Sansa View is for you.

There are a few problems with in-vehicle accessories such as player docks and other player specific accessories. Let’s say that you bought an iPod and had a dock professionally installed to look and work seamlessly with your car’s stereo or after market head unit. Then you finally see all the cool features and devices you are missing outside of the fascist iPod ecosystem. Now you have to tear out that incredibly slick install you just paid top dollar for.

IME has developed and answer to this problem with the IME Dock. The modular dock system will give you a clean install and allow you to upgrade your device across different brands. Each dock will power and supply audio and video line out to your factory stereo or after market head unit.

Currently docks for Microsoft Zune, SanDisk Sansa, and iPod. But IME also has future plans for other players and mobile phones. An interesting thing that I found out while talking with IME was that the Zune dock system has been selling the most preorders. Go Zune!

Soon to be released the dock system will sell for $250 and include one snap on dock for the brand of your choice. When you are ready to change brands a new dock will only cost you around $90. I will be checking one of these out as soon as they are released. This will be a very useful accessory for my massive collection of MP3 players.

[IME Dock]

The Clip is one of my favorite player since its ultra small and has a very rich and flat (as in frequency response) sound to it. From what I have been seeing in the community, the Clip is gaining some respect in the Hi-Fi community and getting paired up with expensive IEMs. That said, demographic is a slightly different crowd and demand a bit more control of their music collection and a finer tuned feature set.

For the features I see important to this user base who are using the Sansa Clip as a high end portable source, here are the important features for this particular niche.

I sat down with SanDisk this morning and the only (but still very cool ) new thing they had to show was the silver 4GB clip. The only thing new with the Clip is it gets a new silver paint job and an increase to 4GB. The new Clip will be on sale come February and will retail for $80. I also mentioned the possible support for other codecs on the clip such as FLAC and OGG since the Clip is gaining some appeal among the hi-fi crowd. While it is still just a thought, I think there is a good chance of this being added since they overall are pretty responsive to the community overall.