[gorcorps]

I bought a sansa e280 for my dad's xmas gift. It's his first mp3 player and he aint so PC savy so I'm charging it for him and putting a few albums he likes so he can play with it when he first opens it. So here's my impression of it so far.

FILE TRANSFERS:
You can select UMS or MTP on the fly in the options. Very nice feature to be able to switch between the 2. It has a proprietary cable (boo) that it charges from as well. It's about as fast as you'd expect using UMS, and the MTP worked well with WMP11. The sansa can only browse music by database, no filetree. That wouldn't be a problem except that it had a problem w/ v2.4 ID3 tags. It was fine w/ 2.3 but I had to mess with the tags in another program to get them to show up in the sansa.

CONTROLS/INTERFACE:
The mechanical scroll wheel isn't very smooth, and it feels like it sticks sometimes. Other than that it's a nice control system with a well put together UI. The now playing screen is pretty plain compared to the rest of the screens though, which is a bummer.

SOUND:
There's a 5 band EQ which as of a few firmwares ago can be fully customized. However, I found the quality of the low-end w/ my shure e2cs not so great. I like a decent amount of punch in my bass and I couldn't get that sound out of the little sansa. But other than that it's very clear and the EQ is nice.

RADIO:
Good reception, and surprisingly decent sound from it as well

So that's it. After rebate it was $220USD so for 8gigs that's pretty good. The tag problems + subpar sound quality (for me) is disappointing but not enough to regret the purchase.