I was bemoaning the fact I didn’t have an MP3 player to take with me for my trip yesterday when I remembered I had a test Canon V300 yet to be tested. In the past I took my handy Dell Axim PDA (not short for public display of affection) to catch up on the news and listen to some MP3s/podcasts. Well, about a year ago the screen… died.

I didn’t have much time - maybe an hour before we had to leave - but I pulled the V300 out of the box, stuck a SD card with some Puffy MP3 files on it and bam! it played them without any setup.

I was very impressed especially after all the pain I went through to figure out how to set up the Casio XD-GW9600’s USB support (see this previous post).

It seemed all was well, until I got to my destination and attempted to play some songs. Unfortunately, at some point my SD card died. After that first successful test, I dumped several hundred megs of MP3s on the card and packed everything to go. I suppose I must have messed up the card pushing it in and out of my computer and/or the Canon V300. Or perhaps some file corrupted the directory structure on the card. I don’t know, but I won’t be able to fully test the V300 until the new SD cards I bought come in.

I bought two two giggers and after recovering from yesterday’s trauma, I decided to pick up a cheap, but decent standalone MP3 player.

I decided on the SanDisk SDMX3-2048 Sansa M250 2 GB MP3 Player. Most of the negative reviews were from people saying it died fairly quickly. While other positive reviewers say they’ve dropped it on a regular basis and have had no problems. The way I see it is it has a year warranty. Beyond that, at $59, it can be disposable.

Of course it plays MP3 and WMA files, but it also has a built in FM radio (which the IPod doesn’t have and I wanted). It also can store files like a thumbdrive which makes it handy in that respect too.

Anyway, I will report here how it turns out. It’s not the snazziest toy, but it should be a little fun.