Me: I live in Silicon Valley with my wife, child and cat. I have worked at Microsoft since I graduated from College, both in the Macintosh Business Unit on products such as Outlook Express, Entourage, IE, and Virtual PC and in Windows Live on Hotmail, Calendar and People. I am currently a Principal Lead Program Manager on the Windows Live Social Networking team. I basically manage a team of Program Managers responsible for delivering features to support our web and client applications. I've been blogging since 2001 and like to play around with .NET in my spare time working on projects such as dasBlog (the blog that powers this site) and Send to SmugMug (an application for uploading photos to SmugMug). I blog about a number of technology and productivity related topics.
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© Copyright 2010, Omar Shahine
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This is sort of a non-review I guess. I still get a subscription to PC Magazine and Maxum PC. Every so often there are useful tidbits in there. Well in the latest issue I read about the Sansa Express player from SanDisk. I was intrigued by it's cheap price ($60), 1GB of storage, built in USB Stick, OLED display and FM Tuner.
I have an iPod Shuffle, nano and 30GB Player. I wanted something as small as a shuffle but with a screen and FM Tuner. You see, I love the shuffle, but the problem with the shuffle is that if I load it up with a podcast or two, I can never get to it so I can play. Also, if I am randomly listening to music, I usually don't want the shuffle to select a podcast in the middle of my tunes.
Well, the Sansa Express is still in my car. I'm returning it today because in my infinite wisdom I realized something after I got home. All my music is in the AAC format right now. I also have all my music ripped as WMA Lossless on my Media Center, but I'm waay to lazy now to convert that all to a lower WMA bitrate. The iPod can play AAC and MP3 but not WMA. The Zune can play AAC, MP3, and WMA. The Sansa only WMA and MP3.
At this point I can't deal with having another copy of my music library floating around. It means that if I buy a new music CD I will have to rip it 3 times. Ugh.
Anyway, the Sansa Express seems like a great little player. Of course it could suffer from horrible usability like every other player out there (minus iPod and Zune). Anyway, back to Fry's it goes. I hope there is a tiny Zune player in the works, or a shuffle with a display.