Well, the Sansa View was originally supposed to be a dedicated video player, a lot like Creative’s Vision W. But SanDisk scrapped that idea, and the product we have here is now far from being an accomplished video machine. The formats it natively supports are limited, just H.264, WMV, and MPEG4. And that doesn’t mean any video in those formats will automatically work, either, oh no.

We put a random selection of each video format on the player, only to find that it couldn’t play any of them at all. This, we found, was because the resolution of the videos were too high for the player. Unlike Creative’s Vision:m, the View seems unable to downscale video files. And so in most cases, conversion is required.

It’s not great for videos then. But let’s be honest, if you want a portable video player, you’re going to buy an Archos. This is an MP3 player. It’s made for music. And as such, it looks great, it’s easy to use, it sounds fantastic, and it's inexpensive. If you’re in the market for a new MP3 player, and you don’t want an iPod, you could do a lot worse than to plump for the Sansa View. And you couldn't do much better.