Sansa’s SlotRadio is one of the current competitors in the miniature music player field. I’m not sure where the aesthetics of these types of players started but I’ve been seeing more and more of them now. Do note that first ones I saw sporting this square, sub-2-inch frames with small screen were Chinese-brand music players (I actually bought one of them).
On the size department, the SlotRadio is larger than the Shuffle and smaller than the Nano. It has a 1.5-inch OLED screen that displays an easy-to-use and quite informative interface. Controls are responsive while the actual navigation of tracks, playlists and other options is a breeze. There’s a very important control that’s missing, though, and that is moving through a track. Basically, you can’t forward or rewind through a song – a huge negative since I always use music players to listen to ebooks.
Sound is on par with most small players I’ve listened to, including the Shuffle. The FM radio, if you still listen to that, has very good reception. Overall, the player is decent, albeit a little bulky.
There’s no internal storage on the SlotRadio, so you’ll need a microSD card in order to load any tunes. It only plays MP3 and WMA, so you’ll have to convert if you keep your songs in a different format. Sansa is bundling the player, by the way, with a free microSD card that contains 1,000 free songs, although they’re mostly middle-of-the-road tracks, which you’ll either find acceptable or utterly deplorable.
Costing a mere $100, SlotRadio is a decent buy, especially considering the fact that you get 1,000 free songs with the purchase. I’m never paying for one because of I can never listen to an ebook without a forward and rewind, though. For listening to music, I think it’s money well spent.
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