SanDisk Sansa c150 2GB MP3 player

Can SanDisk swipe the iPod Shuffle's market share?

UK Exclusive Everyone wants to be the 'iPod beater'. SanDisk is one of the latest to try its hand, and its introduction of Sansa-branded players last year brought it some success at the low-end of the market. Suitably encouraged, it's launched the Sansa c150, its first MP3 player with a colour screen and the ability to give the competition a run for its money...

The c150 doesn’t look all that special - it’s a standard-sized Flash-based MP3 player with a small LCD screen and a navigation pad on the front. It’s made out of black plastic – glossy on the front and matte on the back, with silver buttons and trim. It’s a rather basic design, but it's stylish and it works for me.

Rather unusually, you hold the player sideways when in use, so the screen is on the left, with the navigation pad on the right. On the right-hand bottom corner is the power button, which also doubles up as the menu button. Press is quickly to access the menu, press and hold it to power the player down.

The navigation pad is unusual too. Pressing it upwards will play and pause tracks, left and right is, respectively, reverse and fast forward, as well as skip back and forth in the track list. Pressing it downwards brings up the music options menu, which allows you to create playlists on the fly and enable options such as shuffle and repeat.

As you might have realised from the pictures, there’s also a centre button in the navigation pad, used as a select button in the menu system. It has no function during music playback. Below the screen on the side of the player are a microphone and a hold switch - on the opposite side is the volume control.