I got my player a few weeks ago after going through rigorous reviews posted by other users on the Internet. My decision to buy this one instead of iPod was mainly because Sansa is more open system than Apple's iPod. Also, I recalled that MaximumPC sometime ago had reviewed and made comparison between some audio formats and Real's Rhapsody audio format (*.rax) is superior than others, including Apple's AAC (*.m4p or *.m4a).
Another reason is that Rhapsody has monthly rental service plan, which allows you to listen to their files (yes, all of them which is millions of music files) on the go (on Sansa players) or through its Rhapsody software running on PC. They even allow us to indirectly transcode the files to non-DRM MP3 or WMA format. How, you may ask? It is by burning your purchased music files and then re-rip them to unprotected MP3 or WMA. The quality of this *.rax files are really good and the size is not bigger than average high quality MP3 encoded in VBR.
One thing I don't like from Sansa is the buttons on the front. The four buttons surrounding the rotating wheel are placed sunken (shallow) than the wheel hence make them harder to reach/to push.
Quality of the sound is average. Sometimes I hear some distortion, but not sure whether this is caused by the device itself or because the music was undersampled/bad encoder.
Will continue in more detail if time permits.
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