SanDisk Sansa Clip+ 8 GB

The Sansa Clip has been big news in the past few months: it manages to combine an affordable price tag and superior audio quality in a particularly small form factor.  The only thing that was missing was the microSD card slot that its big brothers had.  Its successor, the Sansa Clip+ does have one, and faces the tough task of doing at least as well as its predecessor.

Handling: the headphone jack is still on the sound!

Unfortunately, SanDisk still hasn't moved the headphone jack onto the top of the device, which means you'll be better off with headphones that have an elbow joint at the end.  Elsewhere, everything has been straightened out and none of the original Clip's curves have survived.  The On/Off/Hold switch has been changed slightly, which is good.  All of the controls are still laid out logically and easy to use without even looking; the menus are clear too, and it's obvious that they've taken their inspiration from the Clip's firmware.

You can copy files either using UMS or MTP.  We prefer the former, but you can use either ... Whichever protocol you end up using, you'll probably with the USB cable was a little longer to make plugging it it in easier.  We'd also happily have seen a lanyard, even on a such small player with such a solid clip.

Audio Quality: watch out Cowon

Let's not waste any time here: plenty of people think that the original Clip could easily join the very best digital audio players in terms of the quality of its audio output, and the Clip+ is very much in the same league.  The sound doesn't lose any of its analytic quality, but is a little warmer, reminding us what we've seen from Cowon.  It's an interesting way of doing things, but not to be ruled out.  In fact, the only criticism we have of the Clip+'s audio compared to some of Cowon's players is the rather weak equaliser.  But then again, Cowon's multimedia players are much bigger and much more expensive ...

Our view of the headphones hasn't changed at all: you should throw them out and replace them with a decent pair straight away.  Battery life hasn't budged either, but remember that you can't expect to get as much juice out of such a small device as you can something with larger batteries.