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The Sansa Clip music player is 5.5x3.5x1.5cm and weighs only 27grams. Mine was black with the sliders on each side in a silver/grey colour.

The rear of the unit has a good strong clip built in and once clipped to a pocket or belt it will stay there even for those active types who jog or run. Just above this almost invisible on the top edge is the pin hole microphone.

The front has the small display 2.3x1.2cm is amazingly clear and easy to read and it shows four lines of information, below this and to the right is the only button clearly marked with a picture of a house. The area below this has the more or less obligatory five position joystick.

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The left side has a mini USB connector (used for charging and transfer of tracks) and the hold on/off slider. The right side has 3.5mm headset connector and volume up/down button.

My model had a capacity of 2GB and I copied 260 tracks (jazz and vocals) to take exactly half this capacity. Transferring is just a matter of connecting the short 15cm mini USB to USB lead. Windows will recognize the Sansa Clip and places it in My Computer you can then drag and drop files to it. A quick index takes place when you disconnect it. I managed to play 249 of the 260 tracks before the rechargeable battery was exhausted this was 16hours and 20minutes.

I found a full recharge took 3hours and 50minutes. This is done by simply connecting the USB lead to the unit and waiting, you can transfer items to the folder structure but items cannot be played while connected.

I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the FM radio (available from the house menu) and you can even store channels in presets, a very nice feature.

It was just as easy to access the voice menu and recording worked well using the buttons on the joystick that are easy to read when the backlight is on, the length of time is adjustable in the settings menu again easily accessible from the house button. The default setting is ten seconds just nice time to do what you need.

Reading the four line display was a joy the top line in yellow shows the track number in any given folder for example 4/15 and the battery state. The other three lines are in blue, artist name, album name and track name, finally the elapsed time shown to the right of a moving bar that shows the length of the track played.

Sound quality from the supplied earbuds was okay, as regular readers will know I struggle with in ear offerings after an hour or two and prefer my own over ear clip ones but sound again was fine. I also attached the Sansa Clip to external speakers and the Parrot Boombox recently reviewed, in both cases it was hard to believe I was only listening to standard 128mbps MP3 files, the quality was excellent.

As stated initially this is far from a standard MP3 player not just because of the extra features FM radio and voice recording features, also the 16hours and 20minutes between charges and the very easy transfer of items to the unit. Mainly just the sound quality when output through speakers or a Boombox.

Doing my Internet searches found the SanDisk Sansa Clip at a best price of £30.43 including delivery from the first link below. Available colours seem to be Black, Blue, Pink and Red. The SanDisk (USA) site also shows a 4GB silver model.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/offer-listing/B001AIQ0LY?condition=new

http://search.sandisk.com/?c=1&cat=1&q=sansa+clip