Small and lightweight with display

  Overwhelmed with the choices out there I decided on the Sansa clip for a number of reasons, and I'm very happy with my choice. First of all the small size and built in clip are perfect for any activity and I wouldn't have to buy a holster. It has a nice display that lets you access all the features with ease. And the ability to share music. With Ipods the music only goes ON--you can't get it back to a computer.
   It has an FM radio that you can listen to if you get bored with what you have or if you want to tune in to listen to a TV at the gym (my gym has a different freq for each tv) It even picks up radio stations at 41,000 feet!
   A voice recorder is great for lectures if you are a student.  Quality isn't all that great but it helps.
   The unit is very easy to load music onto and you have several choices.  You can "drag and drop" from your "My Music" folder, use Windows Media Player, or use Rhapsody (disk is included, or you can download it from the web).  Warning with Rhapsody: if you use the service to purchase music, you have to periodically sync your device or the music files will stop working. Think of it more as "renting" the songs--they are not actually yours and you can't share them or burn them to cd. However, you can use the rhapsody program to create PLAYLISTS on your Sansa Clip which is cool.  It comes with one playlist built in (Go List) which you can send songs to while listening--Ok, say you drag and drop 200 songs on it, and later are listening to them and a song comes up that you think would be good for working out.  Just press and hold the center button and that song is added to the Go List. Then next time your at the gym, you go to the "GoList" and all the songs are there!  The press and hold function can also be toggled to "rate a song"  You can "rate" songs and play your top rated songs (Another built in play list of sorts). You can also play by artist, album, genre, or just play all. It also has a shuffle mode which is nice.
   The battery has an incredible lifespan (up to 15 hours) and has battery saving features that are adjustable like backlight timing, sleep mode (you can set it so it plays for the desired ammount of time and then it shuts off automatically), and auto off (if you pause it and forget about it--so your battery doesn't run out.)  It also has a HOLD function so buttons don't accidentally get pressed.
   There are two things I don't like about it: There's no expansion slot, and folder support is not available--Say for instance you have a folder on your computer called "oldies" that has 100 songs, all from different artists but are grouped together to separate them from your other music.  You try to put that on your Sansa Clip and all the songs get put on by artist and album.  You cannot fire up your Mp3 player and play "oldies". You would have to create a play list first, add the songs to your Rhapsody library and then drag them all into that play list. Not that big a deal I guess. Also Rhapsody doesn't care how you have your music organised on your computer, it breaks them down by artist. Which makes it hard to find music sometimes. A good thing about Rhapsody though is that it loads the music in the bitrate you tell it to, so you can keep the bigger files on your computer but they won't take up as much space on the device. Also, even though it is a bit like Itunes, Rhapsody doesn't take all the music in your library and save it on your hard drive AGAIN in a different format. (Itunes and Ipods are very limiting! They are pretty though and have a lot of aftermarket stuff to spend even more of your money on, lol)
   I kind of wish I ponied up the extra $20 for the 2GB version though.  Mine has 219 songs on it which is 13.5 hours and it has 1.4 mb of room left.  Wish I had more room!  My daughter played with mine a bit and bought the 2gb!