Our favorite little player got crammed into a once live grenade. The project creator Matt said that this genuine “decommissioned training grenade” was indeed a legal purchase in the state of New York, but stressed the purchase a bit. He used a 2GB Sansa Clip, but I think a Sansa slotPlayer may have been a bit of a better choice. The MP3 grenade is something that will surely turn some heads or alert the authorities walking around in any city. Just don’t scream “detonating!” when pressing the big red button used to change tracks. Getting though airport security should be a bit of a challenge as well.

[NYC Resistor | Make | Flickr via Gizmodo]

When I fly I usually pack several MP3 players but only one for the seat since is such a pain to dig around in those tiny seats. In the past I have used a simple soft case to hold the player and the Shure SE530s (Amazing isolation and sound quality for flying, 'eff Bose!) all in one neat package. Though I did always worry about smashing it in between a seat or dropping it in the boarding and unboarding chaos.

So I stumbled on this little gem today at Best Buy. It’s made for the iPod (Ew, I know right?) but will work with anything that will fit. There is also a headphone cable leading from the inside to a plug on the outside for waterproof use.

After we learned about the 8GB Sansa Clip a few days ago the crave for a new firmware and FLAC support has grown even stronger. Well people you can stop hoping, FLAC support is now available along with other updates through the 01.01.30FW.

Along with FLAC support the update brings general upgrades like better M3U playlist support and faster database updates. There are also a lot of bug fixes which alone should be worth the update. Along with the 01.01.30 firmware theres a 2.01.16 update apparently linked to "hardware revision 2". No one really knows what this is at the moment but it might be the 8GB Clip. Hit the jump for a changelog on 01.01.30.

[ABi Forum Download Page|SanDisk Forum Official Release Thread]

The Sansa Clip has sold beyond all expectations and SanDisk's willingness to listen to users when it comes to adding features have made it a really good choice for an MP3 player. The one gripe people have had with it is lack of storage as even though it has a bigger brother (the Fuze) capable of both 8GB capacities and microSD expansion, the Clip itself has maxed out at 4GB...until now.

A French store selling all versions of the Clip has a posting of a 8GB clip available in both black and silver like the 4GB version. It's currently listed as a pre-order with unknown release date for the black version and a September 30th release date for the silver version, which happens to be tomorrow. While it's unlikely it will come out tomorrow it does appear to be legit; the price of about 90 Euro is far higher than that of the 65 Euro 4GB version and so it's doubtful it's a typo. If it turns out to be true this should make a lot of people happy, me included.

[Materiel.net] (thanks Benoit for the tip!)

Having used a Cowon D2 for over a year I must admit that I was losing hope in the manufacturers' ability to make useful firmware updates that actually fix stuff and add useful features instead of breaking what's already there and adding "scicntific" calculators. Luckily it's not just Samsung that knows how to do firmware and the latest update to the Sansa Clip shows that there is still hope if a player doesn't have everything you want at release. Read on to find out what's new in 1.01.29

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 amaze 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 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.

Cracking open the Sansa Clip may not be for the faint hearted since getting into it may render it useless. Although not impossible since the Clip is snapped together and not glued. Regardless, I broke mine so you wouldn’t have to. =)

So what makes that Sansa Clip sound good? Well, I’m not an electronics engineer, nor am I well versed in chip design, but I did find something interesting. Sound quality has some to do with the SOC (system on chip) and / or the DAC (digital audio processor), but it also has to do with the sum of the components, how they are laid out on the main board, and also how they interfere with each other. Then unusually, but smart thing I found inside the clip was a metal plate shielding the circuitry from interference. This is the first time I have seen this out of the many players I have disassembled that did not have wireless functions.

Below there are a few pictures for your browsing. Also be sure to check out the Clip review if you with thinking about purchasing one for the holidays.

The Sansa Clip is SanDisk’s newest edition to the small, low-capacity player market. Clearly aimed to compete with Apple’s Shuffle, it obviously dominates in every way except design and size. It carries itself like many of the Sansa products in design, interface, and features. What sets this Clip apart from the others is its unique form factor and surprisingly good sound quality.

Sansas have not been known for good sound quality. However, over the last few new releases they have been getting progressively better with the Clip being the best sounding Sansa to date- even treading onto audiophile territory.

Read for more of an in-depth review.

SanDisk has answered back to the Creative’s Zen Stone with the Sansa Clip. Around the same size as a matchbook, the player features an OLED screen (the same one found on the Express) and flexes 15 hours of battery life. The player will feature all the usual features such as FM radio/recorder, voice recorder, and support for WMA and MP3. It will also feature playback for subscription content as well as Audible content.

The Sansa Clip will be available in 1GB and 2GB capacities and sell for $40 and $60 respectively. Unfortunately there is not microSD expansion slot on this one so you are limited to the two capacities. You will be able to purchase the Clip sometime at the end of September in black, red, pink, and blue.