I Sansa no more

Well, I did it. My Sansa e280 is now once again the property of the Bellevue Circuit City. The gadget had pretty sweet hardware (holding my entire music collection in the palm of my hand was a cool thing), but I have no real need for it -- certainly nothing that would be worth putting up with Sandisk's attitude regarding non-Windows computers.

I'm currently trying to decide whether to remain portable-less for now (on the theory that portable media players are likely to advance ridiculously in the next few months), to buy a simple 4GB or 2GB Flash player, or to give up on Flash for the time being and get a hard disk-based player. I'm leaning towards waiting until the 4GB model of the Cowon D2 becomes available in the U.S., and then ordering it -- its feature set is pretty amazing, and hopefully 4GB will be enough storage capacity (especially considering that you can insert an SD flash card to get more storage space). In the meantime, I can cover most of what I was using the player for with a combination of podcasts, .oggs of my music, and borrowing Kate's portable FM radio. Less convenient, but entirely workable.