While nobody has come close to improving on the classic simplicity of Apple's iPod navigation, Sandisk has got the closest to emulating it.

Like almost all portable music players, the e260 uses playlist-based navigation to find and play a piece of music. It has a wheel, which glows blue when in use, that is used to cycle through lists of music and options.

This is the only player we've seen to successfully emulate Apple's scroll wheel approach and it does this quite well, making navigating through song lists fairly simple.

Annoyingly, there's no way to create a playlist while playing other files. It's possible to add files to the Go List but only while actually playing a song. So unless the music files on the PC are already arranged into playlists, it will mean listening to whole albums on the go.

The other option is to go through each track in turn and select it, play it, then add it to the Go List. Only then is it possible to play the Go List itself. That's fairly annoying.

It used to be that most music players included a slot for memory expansion but that seems to have died out with the huge amounts of built-in storage now available. The e260 is the only player we've seen recently that can be expanded – it has a slot for micro-SD memory cards.

These are starting to show up in high-end phones and are currently quite expensive, but in a year or so, could provide an inexpensive way to get more space when the supplied 4GB is full.

The Sansa e260 can play video files, although these need to be specially converted using the supplied software. Music, on the other hand, can be simply copied to the device using Windows Media Player, or just Windows itself.

Also consider:
Apple iPod nano
An excellent alternative for a stylish player
£169
4/5

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