Ever since the iPod became a culture-changing phenomenon, Apple’s rivals have been desperate to discover the recipe for an iPod beater.
SanDisk has just released its latest answer: the Sansa Connect ($250). The ingredients are:
1 black, shiny, softly rounded plastic case, the size of a closed cellphone;
1 click wheel, like the iPod’s but made of black rubber;
7 jacks and buttons on the edges: volume keys, earbud jack, proprietary U.S.B./charging connector, On/Off, Hold, memory-card slot;
1 antenna;
Mix gently; cook until well done.
The stubby little antenna is the secret sauce. It makes the Connect the most exciting advance in music players, at least in concept, since the iPod Nano.
Now, this Sansa is not the first wireless music player; Microsoft’s Zune, for one, preceded it.
But the Zune’s Wi-Fi is wasted. It can’t sync with a computer wirelessly or download music wirelessly. All it can do is beam a song to another Zune owner, if there is such a thing. The song self-destructs after three days or three plays.
When you’re in a Wi-Fi hot spot with the Sansa, though, you can tune into any of Yahoo’s 200 Internet radio stations. And if you’ve signed up for Yahoo’s music-rental plan ($144 a year, or $15 a month), you can download all the music you like, straight to the player. No computer necessary.
That’s a delicious twist. Surely, this is the future of music players: instant access to any song, any album, whenever and wherever you’re in the mood.
Sansa’s collaboration with Yahoo has another payoff: at any time, you can click through your own online photo collection on the bright 2.2-inch screen — whatever you’ve posted on the free Flickr photo-sharing Web site, which Yahoo owns — as your music plays. It’s magically simple, and it beats the old accordion-fold wallet photos. (You can’t, unfortunately, look at your friends’ photos.)
Now, these subscription plans have a catch: If you ever stop paying the monthly fee, all of your downloaded music vanishes.
Of course, you can also stuff the Sansa with MP3 files you’ve ripped from your own CD collection, or with songs you’ve bought for $1 each from music stores like Yahoo or Rhapsody.com. Both are synched from Yahoo Music Jukebox, a Windows-only program that’s a lot like the iTunes software. (Alas, the Sansa can’t play unprotected AAC files, like the ones the iTunes Store expects to begin selling next month.)
The MiniSD card slot is an ingenious twist. It extends the player’s built-in 4 gigabytes of memory almost endlessly. You can’t save downloaded music onto the card — all downloads are locked on the player — but the Sansa can play music and photos you’ve loaded onto the card from your PC.
The sound quality through the cheap black earbuds is fine, but audiophiles will prefer better headphones. There’s even a tiny built-in mono speaker on the back. Its sound output wouldn’t shake a toothpick, let alone the rafters, but it’s handy when your earbud cords are too tangled to bother with.
The Sansa, in other words, ought to be a real delicacy. Unfortunately, it has popped out of the SanDisk ovens slightly undercooked.
Imagine, for example, the power of Sansa’s chief ingredient: instant real-time flat-fee access to anything in Yahoo’s catalog of two million songs.
You could snag the new U2 just for kicks. You could download a classic Steven Wright comedy album for part of a six-hour drive. Every time you read about a new album or hear a new song on the radio, you could help yourself, guilt-free.
The spontaneity would put the iPod to shame. The song-requesting feature would put satellite radio to shame. And the Wi-Fi freedom would make the Zune crawl back into its hole.
Unfortunately, no matter what SanDisk says, you do not have access to all of Yahoo’s two million songs — because the Sansa doesn’t offer any way to find them. There’s no Search command, no master list of bands or albums — no direct access at all.
In fact, you can download only a tiny fraction of Yahoo’s catalogs: just what Yahoo decides to offer you on three sampler platters.
The first sampler is Yahoo’s set of 200 Internet radio stations. These are especially cool ones, because (if you’re a paid subscriber) you can hit the Skip button to start streaming the next song in the “radio station’s” playlist at any time. More amazingly still, when you hear a song you like, you can download it to your player, or even the entire album, with two button taps.
Second, you can get the songs on Yahoo’s Most Popular lists in various genres. Finally, you can browse a list of recommendations that Yahoo calculates on the songs you’ve rated highly using the Sansa’s click wheel. (Its logic can be a tad opaque. If you like the tear-jerking ballad “Bring Him Home” from “Les Misérables,” Yahoo recommends Abba’s disco hit “Dancing Queen.”)
But that’s it. If you’re in the mood for anything or anyone specific — Kelly Clarkson, say, or Green Day, or Tchaikovsky — too bad. If Yahoo hasn’t put it on the menu today, you can’t have it.
There are a number of other problems, too. For example, you can’t get onto any Wi-Fi hot spot that requires a Web log-in or a credit card number. So much for all those airports and coffee shops.
And once you’re on, the Sansa can be a cranky little companion. In an effort to prolong its fairly measly battery life — 6 hours of playback if you use the wireless features; 12 hours if not — Sansa is programmed to drop its Wi-Fi connection automatically whenever the battery charge drops below 60 percent. Mine, in fact, dropped the Wi-Fi connection every few minutes even when plugged in; SanDisk says that isn’t normal.
Worse, a disappointing percentage of the songs and albums never arrive at all. Whenever you select a song for download, the words “Request Added” appear on the screen; confusingly, the player doesn’t begin downloading immediately, but rather adds your requests to a list that’s sometimes downloading and sometimes not.
You have to burrow deeply into its menus to find the waiting list. That’s also where you find the folder called Unable to Download.
Yahoo explains that many of its songs are internally flagged as “not downloadable” in a complex copy-protection scheme. Fine, but then the Sansa should identify them upfront instead of getting your hopes up.
The Sansa can also do the Zune trick of detecting nearby Sansas, and beaming songs to them from yours. Your Yahoo Messenger chat friends can even see what song you’re listening to, although you can’t actually chat.
In both cases, though, you’re exchanging only song names — and only songs that you got from Yahoo, at that. The lucky recipients have to go and download their own copies. Of course, if they’re also paid subscribers, that’s only a two-click process.
(The only features that don’t require a paid subscription are the Flickr photo access, Internet radio and the ability to play songs from your PC or a memory card. Mac users can’t even sign up for Yahoo Unlimited, and therefore won’t get much out of the Sansa — which is odd, considering that the Sansa’s stated mission is to minimize the role of the computer in the cycle of consuming music.)
Finally, the Sansa’s software is bright and attractive, but confusing. Pressing the left-arrow button sometimes takes you back to the previous screen — as it should — and sometimes doesn’t. On the Now Playing screen, for example, you’re supposed to rotate the scroll wheel to backtrack instead. None of this is aided by what SanDisk generously calls its user manual: a terse, slapped-together PDF document with only two screen illustrations.
There’s no video playback, no voice recording and no traditional radio — and, of course, there are no carrying cases, car adapters, countertop speaker systems or any other iPod-type accessories.
A Yahoo Music spokesman admits that the Sansa Connect confection may not please all palates. He says solving the problems — especially the inability to search Yahoo’s catalog — is “high on our list.” He also says updated software can be wirelessly beamed into existing Sansas.
That’s fortunate. Because based on its recipe, the Sansa Connect should be a real masterpiece. Unfortunately, there’s only one way to describe the version on store shelves now: half-baked.
