Sansa Clip Saga

In November 2008 I wanted to buy a portable music player to keep me company on my runs. At that time I was undecided between the Sansa Clip and the iPod Shuffle. I finally decided to go for the Sansa Clip: it gave me double the space as compared to the Shuffle (4 GB vs 2GB) for the same price; it could play more audio formats; it had a built-in radio; it had an OLED user interface; it had an audio recorder. The player was purchased from Amazon and yours truly proceeded to happily use it on runs.

I didn't face any problems until January this year. I was running on the treadmill, with the clip attached to my t-shirt, when suddenly one side of the clip broke off. The music player was still working, just that I couldn't attach it properly to any part of my clothing. As the product was still in the 1 year warranty period I decided to mail Sandisk's support desk and see if I could get it repaired.

So I took photos of the broken clip. Dug up my purchase order from Amazon and compiled an email asking the Sandisk support people how they could help me.

And then, I waited ... and waited ... and waited ... and waited. Just to get an auto-response email, giving me a support request number, took them 3 weeks. A week after that I got a response saying that the clip is not covered in the warranty. I was disappointed, but at least I could still use the player.

Then at the beginning of this month, while I was listening to music on the clip, the player suddenly shut off. At first I thought that the battery had drained. But to my surprise, when I plugged the clip to charge, it just wouldn't and neither would it turn on.

So once again, I dug up my purchase order and typed out an email to the Sandisk customer service. And again I waited for a response.

Today when I checked back on their customer support site, I saw that my request had been closed and their justification for closing it was left out blank!!


To put it lightly -- this is truly unprofessional and I feel cheated as a consumer. Needless to say that I'm not going to recommend any music players from Sandisk. Maybe I should have gone and bought an iPod. Maybe I will.

Update (20/3/2009): I stand corrected. Continue reading on what happened next.