Full Review

After reading several reviews I recently picked one of these up at Best Buy and so far I love it. My wife does, too and we fight over who gets to use it.. I may have to get another one.

I wanted a small DAP and was originally interested in the Creative Zen Stone. While I was reading a review of it and the review comments someone mentioned that the Sansa Express was a better player with a 4 line OLED and MicroSD expansion capability. That sealed the deal for me.

Some of the features include:
Voice recording
FM receiver with recording capability. 20 presets.
Graphic equalizer
Shuffle
Audio book support.

The player is not much bigger than a Bic lighter. The front is black with a shiny surface that will attract fingerprints. The controls consist of a blue backlit square 4 way rocker switch and a center button. The top of the player has a small menu button and a hold switch to lock the controls. The menu button will instantly get you back to the main menu categories in case you get lost in the sub-menus. Small volume up and down buttons reside on the bottom. The player boasts a MicroSD slot, which I have populated with a Transcend 2GB card. The Sansa Express has an end cap which pops off to reveal a standard USB 2.0 plug. You can just stick the player in your computer directly or use the short included USB extension cable. The player is automatically detected by Windows XP and appears as an audio device under "My Computer". Loading songs is as easy as dragging and dropping. It also supports syncing with Windows Media Player 10 and 11.

Navigation and song selection are very easy. I like the way the menus are layed out. You can sort music by artist, album,
genre, etc.

The audio quality is very good IMO. All of my songs are encoded in 320K or 200 VBR .mp3 and they sound very nice.
You will want to pick up some decent earbuds. The included buds sound terrible and kill your ears after a short period of time. I got some Sennheiser MX400's for $10 and they sound
100% better.

Charging is done via USB so it could be a problem if you don't have one available. There are products out there that charge USB devices. Someone on a forum said that they use the Lil' Sync Penguin to charge theirs. It takes about 2 hours to fully charge the first time and the battery life is advertised at 15 hours.

Included items:
Earbuds (see above, truly awful)
Lanyard
CD with manual in PDF format and a trial subscription to the Best Buy music service
Small USB extension cable. Useful for me because my PCs front USB plugs are upside down and I can't read the Sansa's display with it plugged in.
Quick start guide. I didn't notice this at first and it answered my question about how long it needed to charge.

Overall, a great product at a very low price. I highly recommend it.

I did get a later version of firmware with my player:
01.00.15A2. The main thing that it fixes is that it now tells you when the device has fully charged. You will see this as a complaint for people with earlier versions of FW.