The Sandisk Sansa e250 is a budget MP3 player that can be had for under $30 if you know where to look. I got one from Woot.com for $34.99 shipped. I have had this MP3 player for almost eight months.

The build quality of the Sandisk Sansa e250 is good. It has a nice, sleek front cover that doesn’t scratch easily, and a matte dark silver back. Four screws are visible on the back. The scroll wheel on the front has a bright blue backlight. It looks like it’s lit in four places, and it’s not a perfectly even glow. This scroll wheel also wobbles a lot, and is the worst part of the build quality section. Everything else is solid. There is also a voice recorded and a slot for a micro SD card if you want to expand the memory. The stock headphones are terrible and belong in your trash can right away. They are worse than airline headphones.

On the software side, the e250 has a radio, and of course an MP3 player. The MP3 player displays the filenames of the songs, not the embedded artist and song name information like an iPod does. The software is also very buggy. It does not want to turn on a lot of the time, and sometimes it doesn’t turn off. When charging, it often doesn’t charge at all and flashes a low battery warning. Also when charging, the backlight on the screen stays on, which can be annoying if you want to leave it to charge overnight. And if you turn off your computer while charging, the backlight will stay on even though it’s not charging anymore - depleting the whole battery.

The software is terrible, and it makes the whole MP3 player terrible. Of course you can load up some custom firmware and software on it, but this review is for the stock MP3 player since most people won’t be changing software. The interface of the stock software is ugly, buggy, and overall crap. If it wasn’t for the software and the wobbly scroll wheel, I would say this little 2GB Sandisk Sansa e250 is a better buy than my iPod Nano 4GB was. Overall I rate the Sandisk Sansa e250 6.5/10. And this is because of the ultra low price. If you put custom software and firmware on it, along with some decent headphones, it would be 9.5/10.

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