Sansa Connect: A Pleasant Pre-Christmas Present

Scan back over my past writeups on Sandisk’s Yahoo Music Unlimited-cognizant and Wi-Fi-inclusive Sansa Connect portable multimedia player (which, by the way, is now selling for below $120), and you’ll garner more details on some of the flaws I’ve found with this generally impressive product:

• Incompatibility with access points and wireless-integrated routers that are configured with SSID broadcast disabled for added security.
• Difficulty in determining whether or not the player is in ’sleep’ or ‘off’, along with rapid battery drain in ’sleep’ and an embedded (translation: not user-replaceable) limited-recharge-cycle battery.
• An inability to directly access YME’s entire music library from the player.
• Neutered support for microSD cards; they can’t be accessed via MTP and are therefore incapable of holding DRM’d subscription music content.

The Sansa Connect has been in production for nearly nine months without a major firmware upgrade. Dell announced in early August that it was planning on buying ZING, the core developer of Sansa Connect’s online service direct-access capabilities. Subscription services remain underperformers, in spite of rabid enthusiasm from early adopters like myself…frankly because I think that ‘renting’ music is too much of mind-shift for most folks, who have spent their whole lives buying music first in stores and now online.

The PlaysForSure DRM scheme that Yahoo uses is seemingly in industry phase-out mode; Microsoft has abandoned it for a follow-on approach with the Zune Marketplace, Microsoft’s partnership with MTV is DOA, and RealNetworks is converting to a home-grown DRM with Rhapsody. And Yahoo is in fairly dire big-picture financial straits. All of these factors contributed to my belief that the Sansa Connect was doomed to be yet another ‘could-have-been’ casualty on the side of the technology highway.

I’m delighted to tell you that I was wrong. Tipped off by posts on the Sansa Connect discussion group this morning, I updated the firmware on my unit. It wasn’t easy; the Sansa Connect for some unknown reason was unable to obtain an IP assignment from my router even after I enabled SSID broadcast on both LAN wireless transceivers, and my neighbors’ open wireless networks were too faint to establish a sustainable connection. Eventually, I broke out my cellular router and did the firmware download deed that way…after which time I was able to tap into my LAN with the Sansa Connect…even with SSID broadcast disabled! Here’s the list of changes and additions:

• Video Support – The 1.1.1 release allows users to play MPEG4 video files on the device. Only videos converted using the Sansa Media Converter are supported.
• Artist Search in Get More Music – Users can now search the Yahoo! library for songs by artist’s name.
• "Browse Music" feature added to Get More Music – Top Albums, Top Songs and Explore by Genre are the user selections available for browsing.
• Ability to stream music in Get More Music – Users can now play from a stream, instead of having to download the music found.
• Support for microSD and microSDHC cards up to 8GB. Ability to read and write to the microSD card via MTP.
• WiFi – Captive Portal support at many public hotspots. This depends largely on the way the hotspot was setup by the Internet Service Provider used. Support for major hotspots include: AT&T, FON, Wayport and T-Mobile.
• Support for hidden WiFi networks ( access points using the Hide SSID option)
• Power saving enhancements in SLEEP mode. The Connect will transition to OFF after 72 hours in SLEEP mode or if the battery level drops below 5%.

On that last point, the display transitions from ‘Going To Sleep…’ to ‘Shutting Down’ as you hold down the power button, thereby providing clear visual feedback on what power mode the unit is entering. And I love being able to search by artist through the player’s GUI. Yes, the Sansa Connect still has an embedded battery, but that’s a hardware issue not solvable with a firmware upgrade. And I’m hopeful that third-party services (like those that have sprung up for iPods) will serve me well when my unit’s battery dies.

My faith in Sandisk and Yahoo is restored, although the fact that the portable player-cognizent ‘To Go’ variant of Yahoo’s subscription music offering is now well-hidden on the website (good luck trying to find a link to there from the main music or Yahoo Music Unlimited pages), along with posts like this one, leave its long-term future still in doubt in my mind. With that said, if you’re interested in taking the subscription music plunge, the two-years-for-one promotion with Mastercard still seems to be available.