In my tests, it lasted for 13 hours and 19 minutes of continuous playback before it died. Still, it's a handy feature to have.īattery life is rated at 15 hours of playback. The voice recorder picked up my voice clearly and loudly, but it also captured a lot of background noise. It also tended to, in scan mode, skip some working stations that it would then receive loud and clear a moment later.
So it's a slow go finding your favorite stations. For one, it scrolls through every point on the dial-89.1, then 89.2, then 89.3, and so on. The FM radio works fine, save for a couple of minor annoyances. If you’re not into iTunes but still want a robust way to manage your music, Rhapsody is a nice alternative, but I preferred the drag-and-drop method.
The Sansa Clip Zip and Rhapsody are tightly integrated, giving subscribers access to Rhapsody’s huge library of songs, and the ability to manage your player within the Rhapsody application.
Or, you can pop the tiny disc that’s included with Clip Zip, which lets you update the device’s firmware, as well as installs the Rhapsody software onto your machine.
To get your music on the player, You can connect it to your Windows or Mac computer, and just drag and drop files onto the drive as you would with any external drive. The Sansa Clip Zip supports MP3, AAC, WMA, OGG, FLAC, a audio files, as well as podcasts and audiobooks (the latter two are sorted out into their own menus).
Luckily, the Clip Zip comes with a free trial to TuneUp, a downloadable application that digs through your music collection and automatically updates track information, and downloads album artwork. When you’re listening to music, the Clip Zip either shows the album artwork (if you’ve got it), or rotates among an assortment of similar wallpapers. It’s not attractive, but it’s intuitive and easy to operate. It’s like an iPod menu in that it’s simple to navigate through but might take some time if you’ve got a giant music library. The small screen means you can only see four lines at a time, especially since the top third of the display is wasted by the top menu and a large page title-it’s a poor use of screen real estate. Clicking into one of them reveals simple, text-based menus you scroll through with the directional pad. On the Home screen, you get six different options: Music, Radio (FM only), Books (audiobooks), Voice (for making voice recordings), Card (for accessing content on the external card), Sport (a stopwatch), and Settings. The interface is extremely basic, which isn’t surprising given both the price of the Clip Zip and the size of its screen-there’s not much to work with here. It's more like the Sansa Clip+'s controls, which we liked more than the Fuze+.
Up and to the left is a Back button that brings you back one screen. The Clip Zip is much more obvious: there are Up/Down/Left/Right buttons (each doubles as something else, such as Play or Forward-it’s sort of like the Apple iPod classic ($249, 4 stars), which marries a scroll wheel with clickable buttons), surrounding a Select button is in the center. The directional pad is the Clip Zip’s biggest improvement over the SanDisk Sansa Fuze+ ($79-$119, 3.5 stars), which used capacitive buttons and a hit-or-miss gesture-based system. That’s not a dealbreaker, but it’s worth noting. It’s quick to lock and unlock, but if it’s powered down, which it automatically does after a period of inactivity, it takes thirty seconds or so to boot. Using the PlayerThe biggest problem I had with the SanDisk Sansa Clip Zip was obvious the first time I turned the player on it’s oddly slow to boot. There’s a Power button on top Volume buttons and a micro USB port on the left side a micro SD slot which accepts cards up to 32GB, and a headphone jack on the right side and on the front, a five-way directional pad, a dedicated, raised Back button and a 1.1-inch screen that looks tiny, but works well. Albeit small, the mere existence of a display is where the Clip Zip edges out the screenless iPod shuffle. Like the iPod shuffle, the Clip Zip’s whole back is a clip, and it’s quite sturdy no amount of shaking even budged it from its perch during my tests.