My Sandisk Sansa E260 recently bricked itself.  Why did this happen?  I don’t know, I didn’t do anything to it, it just wouldn’t turn on one day.  To be fair, I knew it was dying, I had several read errors, and I suspected the filesystem was becoming corrupted, and the controls were certainly dying, being touchy at best.

As such, it was time for me to buy a new player.  I looked around, wasn’t quite ready to by an android phone, but still needed a player to play ogg files.  After a quick trip to ABI, and several days of searching, I finally decided to get a new Sansa, this time the SanDisk Sansa Fuze, it had 8 GB of internal storage, not much, but 4 more than what I previously had, and best of all, it was capable of running Rockbox, the open source firmware which was the only reason I bought the e200, and then the fuze, in the first place.

I knew that there was two versions of the Sansa Fuze, a newer one, and an older one, thusfar, the people at Rockbox have only been able to port it to the older one.  The catch is that there is no way to determine which version of the hardware you got, until after you have bought the device.  I even asked a representative of Sandisk, and they were unable to give me a proper answer.  Again, to be fair, the person was still very helpful.  Here is a clip of our conversation:

*****: Let me provide you information on this.
*****: You are asking the firmware of the player currently running on the Fuze that you want to purchase.
*****: It is depending on the firmware that we released before it hit the market. Some Fuze might have the older firmware and some can have the newer firmware.
Leif Andersen: Yes
*****: Nevertheless, the firmware of the player can be updated to the latest that we have to enhance it.
Leif Andersen: Okay, is there anyway I can tell before I purchase it?
Leif Andersen: Okay, thank you.
*****: Even if you don’t have the latest firmware. There is a firmware update that we can do. You can check this link for the Fuze’s firmware update:
http://kb.sandisk.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/278

Without being able to get any form of conformation, I took the plunge, and bought a player from Tiger Direct.  It came in today.

I opened the box, started up the player (being very surprised to find it had a few dregs of power sitting in it’s battery), and played around with the menu.  I went into my settings menu, and to my horror, I discovered that the version of the firmware began with V02, meaning that I couldn’t put rockbox on it.  Horrible news.

Now, if I knew ahead of time that I wouldn’t be able to put Rockbox on it, that would be one thing, and I would be fine with that.  However, it drives me nuts that I have no idea of whether or not I will be able to put Rockbox on the device at all, until after I buy it.  I don’t blame the Rockbox community for this, after all, they’re just a bunch of people that develop a good software solution for audio players, but rather SanDisk.  At one point in time, they made a small gesture to Rockbox, by giving them two Sansa E200 devices, however, they have not done anything since.

On the up side of the coin, at least Sansa’s firmware is actually usable this time, unlike on the E200, and maybe in the future I will be able to put Rockbox on it.  Until then, I will contact Sansa support, and see what they have to say about the matter, and I will post it here.

Update:

Good news, with the newest version of Rockbox, I can now put it on my Fuze.  Get it here.

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