Whenever I’m out flying around, I needs my music.
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| Sony NWZ-A845. Nice mp3 player! |
I’ve been using this Sony Walkman NWZ-A845 for years. It’s fine. It boots up pretty fast, and the controls are nice. No yucky touch-screen interface, but nice buttons that do what you expect them to do.
It’s nice.
But it only has 16GB of memory. Now, that’s more albums than I’m going to listen to on even the longest flight, but it’s too little space to store all the good albums I have. If I suddenly get a craving to listen to United States I-IV on a transatlantic flight (as one does), I get mighty peeved if it turns out I’ve forgotten to put Part III on the Sony.
Grr. Peeves! Lars smash!
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| The Sansa Clip Zip comes in the least accessible packaging ever |
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| Sansa Clip Zit. It’s small! And that song came pre-installed! I swear! |
So I basically wanted to just get an upgrade of the Sony. It’s old, so they must have newer, better models?
Nope. Instead they have touch-screen monstrosities that are basically phones without the phone part. Lousy battery time, no USB Mass Storage interface, but the ability to play Angry Birds.
*sigh*
So I googled and I binged, but I couldn’t find any simple mp3 players that had more than 16GB of memory. All was despair.
But someone on a helpful IRC channel pointed me in the direction of the Sansa Clip Zip! It takes Micro SD cards! Up to 32GB! Or 64GB if you Rockbox it! And it runs Rockbox! Which is something that I always wanted to try anyway! Freedom!
So here it is.
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| Sensa Zip Clit is kinda deep. |
It’s very small, but kinda bulky anyway. Almost half the bulk is the clip itself, so I may just snap that off. I wouldn’t have minded if it had been taller and wider and not as deep, but the form factor is quite nice.
I booted it up without the SD card. It starts in about eight seconds, which is acceptable. The controls are nice and responsive.
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| Look at the size of those GBs |
After copying the 500 best albums I have to the 32GB SD card (which took like an hour or two), I put the card into the Sansu Clock Mock. It started building a id3 database.
Building… building…
It used about 20 minutes to read the id3 data, which seemed kinda excessive.
But after finishing up, the Zensa Clap Sap has a nice and snappy user interface.
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| Waiting… Waiting… Waiting… |
It seems perfectly usable. Cute even.
Anyway, I still want Rockbox. I’m not quite sure why now, except… Freedom!
I used the Rockbox Gui to do the installation. First it failed since I was running it as myself. Then I rooted myself, and then it worked.
Excitement!
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| Rockbox! Me no can have waitz! |
Wow! It’s fast! The Zonzi Clap Trap now boots in like a second! Wow!
I asked it it build the id3 database, and was expecting to wait quite a while… And it finished in like 30 seconds! That’s like several magnitudes faster than the original OS!
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| Rockbox isn’t like purdy |
Well, nobody can claim that the Rockbox interface is purdy and stuff, but it’s fast and usable.
So without actually having used this thing in practice (why should this review site be any different than any other?), I give the Sonzi Clip Zap nine thumbs up! It’s just what I wanted!
Yay!
