SanDisk Cruzer Micro Mp3 Companion

 (88 customer reviews)

It's a decent little piece of equipment, that expands the Cruzer Micro flash drive into an MP3 player. It's a fair value for the price, since (now, August 2004) other players with 256MB are going for much more. But it feels a bit cheap in construction and features.

What's good:

The sound is decent, and it interfaces well with my car stereo inputs.

It runs for more than 8 hours on a single AAA battery.

File download is relatively quick and easy. It plays MP3s and WMAs, and ignores other document types one might have on the drive.

What's not so good:

There are very few controls: An on/off/play/pause button on the front, a volume up/down rocker on the side, and a menu/function flick-up/down/in button for traversing all other functions next to it. One can do a fair amount with just these controls, but it takes a lot of care and attention, not good for the car.

There is no easy way to move between folders of music...Read more

I just plugged my half-gig Micro Cruzer into this unit, and despite many negative reviews, it works fine for me!

Let me preface that by saying that this is my first MP3 player, and all I wanted was mobility and inexpensive. These are apt descriptions of this little unit.

It runs forever on a good AAA rechargeable battery, and although it's pure plastic and seems a bit fragile, I dropped it on the concrete while jogging, and it came up working fine.

The instructions tell you very little, so be advised. On the other hand, there's not much to learn. Just plug in the thumb drive (SanDisk only) and play away. It even remembers where you stopped on the next insertion.

Don't expect to read the MP3 indicator text in low light, and the thing desperately needs a case (which I can't find). Nevertheless, for basic MP3 playing, it serves my purpose well. The two-year warranty doesn't hurt either.

I like it. It's small, it's cheap and comes very handy in many ways. I experienced no problems so far. The sound quality is good and might be improved by using headphones of better quality. When I connected the Companion to a stereo results were just fine and the party was saved since the cd-player died. It has a build in equalizer with different settings such as bass boost, hall, classic, normal, rock... There are just a few things that bother me but I can live with them: 1.There's no option to browse through the songlists while the Companion is playing. Thus, you can only skip to the next file or back to the previous. (But you can fast forward (and rewind) within a playing track.) 2.There is no Sleep timer that would come in handy for using the player when hitting the hay.

I think Sandisk could solve these problems by adding fixes to a firm ware update.

You can easily create several folders containing the songs you like on the USB stick on your computer. I just...Read more