I bit the bullet yesterday. Factors:
1. It would be cutting it too close to wait for the View. With it hitting stores (apparently) Oct. 31 and us leaving town Nov. 2 that's just not enough time to get things sorted and we've a lot of last-minute stuff to do.
2. I was also thinking about whether or not we'd truly use the player after vacation so getting something a little cheaper was reasonable. No one appears to be discounting the View by more than a few bucks making the cost per GB of the player similar enough between the 8GB e280 and the 16GB View.
3. To confirm the Sansa was the right choice I checked out the Creative units. They have a totally sucky UI, specifically the Zen Vision:M and Vision:W. Really clunky compared to SanDisk.
Of all places OfficeMax had the e280
on their site for $129.99 so I printed that page & took it to a store, which carries it for $149.99. They price matched their own web site & then I used one of the $10-off-$50 cards that OfficeMax sends me every couple of months to get the price down to $120.
To bump the RAM to 10GB I picked up a
2GB MicroSD card. Dang those things are tiny!
(I love having places like Fry's, TigerDirect, and MicroCenter along my daily commute. They're sure a lot more useful than the 6 Dunkin Donuts I drive past along the same route.)
The MicroSD slot & the e280 show up as 2 different removable drives in XP & Vista. In XP I had to drag 'n' drop to the mSD but within Vista I could Sync to it within WMP. Of course WMP (version 11 on both) would sync to the e280 on either system. SanDisk has videos on their site to walk you through various setup routines, which is good as the printed "manual" is 1 two-sided sheet of paper and that covers multiple languages.
A mini-USB connector would have been better than the proprietary connector they use but I can live with it. An AC adapter would have also been nice but I can get an AC-USB adapter easily enough.
I've filled the mSD and about 3GB of the main RAM with some of my music, leaving the other 5GB for my wife. It'll be easier for her to just sync within WMP & not worry about the mSD.
To finish up we'll pick up a good pair of noise-canceling headphones for her (recommendations welcome!) within the next day or two. Maybe for me as well, although we might just share.
Depending on how much we like the e280 I still may get the View so we'd each have a player of our own. But at this point I'm content to wait & see how much we'll actually use it. And the View would probably make a sweet Christmas present. ;-)
