| By Jeremiah McNichols on music and audio  The Sansa Shaker is a small MP3 player from Sandisk that is designed for kids. By small, we mean very small - I didn't think to do a "player with penny" shot for this review, but at 2 3/4" tall and 1 1/2" across, two pennies would span the player's top. It's a little smaller than our salt shaker, and has a slight "waist" to give it a natural fit for little hands.
That shape is a bit of an advertisement for the Sansa Shaker's overall goal: To design an MP3 player for kids from the ground up. In our view, they have a great success on their hands, and virtually no competition for the features they're offering in this cute little player. It's labeled for ages 8 and up, but we were interested in an "off-label" use and let our three-year-old, Z, give it a trial run, and Sandisk was kid enough to send us one to review. Below, a rundown of the Shaker's key design features and performance.
 The Shaker offers two options for play: dual headphone jacks (to encourage the sharing of music) and a 1" speaker. The speaker quality is better than you'd expect from such a small device, but of course it does best with the higher registers, so kids who demand a lot of bass in their mix might be frustrated. Of course, the older the kid, the more likely they are to just use headphones; the speaker was one of the key features that drew us to the Shaker for our three-year-old, as we have no interest in introducing her to headphones at this point. We might mention at this point that nobody should be selling earbud headphones to kids. If you buy this, throw them away and invest in some traditional headphones - it'll save on hearing aids later.
 Press and hold the play/pause button, and the Shaker starts up with a funny little tuneful drum sound; press and hold it again and it shuts off with a similar vocalization.
The Shaker has no menu to navigate and no play options besides "next" and "previous," but uses an innovative style of ring buttons which are most akin to the kind of gearshifters you find on some mountain bikes - just twist to adjust. The top ring adjusts the volume, and the bottom one switches tracks and fast forwards and rewinds. The volume adjuster is continuous (hold it in the "twisted" position and it keeps changing) but the most relevant feature of the forward/back ring requires you twist and release; holding it in the twisted position fast-forwards or rewinds within a track.
For track switching, though, the Shaker has an additional standout feature that little Z has had no trouble figuring out, and it's the one that gives the product its name. Holding down the play button and giving the device a single shake switches to the next track. For the product's target age range, this is simply a cool feature; for very young children, this feature makes using the Shaker possible. Z still has a hard time with the ring buttons, but she has rapidly gained confidence in changing tracks herself. Like the on/off controls, the "shake" gives the user an auditory signal of success, this time with a sandy "shaker"-like sound. Combined with the physical movement, it's a satisfyingly kinesthetic ways to interact with circuits and electrical currents.
The feature does have a couple of wrinkles, however. Since the play/pause button is used with this track-switching method, depressing the button and accidentally releasing it while or prior to shaking the device results in pausing the music rather than switching tracks, and this is easy enough to do that I have done it myself on more than one occasion while trying to switch tracks for her. If this is done, the player stops playing without it being entirely clear why it has done so, and you must release and press down the button again to make it start playing again where you left off, then try your shake again. It isn't hard to get the hang of, but it does have a learning curve.
Music is stored in MP3 format on an SD (Sandisk) memory card, naturally, and the Shaker comes in 512K and 1G versions, which is just a matter of which card is included with the device. A gently locking twist-off cap on the bottom of the Shaker hides the battery compartment and SD slot, easy enough for an adult to open but impossible for a young child to get into. The MP3 format was a key feature for us, as we didn't want to be stuck using WMA files on the device. (Coverting from iTunes ACC [M4a] format to MP3 is a snap; see comment 3 on this Lifehacker post.)
Battery life when used with the speaker is fairly low (Sandisk states it should last up to 15 hours when using headphones), but it only uses a single AAA battery, so its overall consumption still seemed low. It's supposed to have an "uh-oh" warning when it's low on juice, but we use rechargeable batteries, and with those at least it seemed to lose volume before that ever kicked in. Z would start complaining that she couldn't hear her audio story over the air conditioner, and we'd find ourselves saying to each other, "Geez, is this thing really that quiet?" for a bit before figuring out it just needed a new battery. Again, non-rechargeable batteries might drain more "efficiently," but we prefer to recharge than buy and buy and buy.
A few improvements could be made to this device. It has no track position memory or volume memory, which means that stopping the Shaker and starting it again puts you back at the beginning of a track and at a base volume. Since Z spends a lot of time listening to audio stories on it (Story Nory and some original stuff we'll unveil here in coming months) this is kind of a pain, as volume typically needs to be adjusted up for speaking tracks, and she wants to pick up where she left off. For music, we could see this being a problem if a low volume was desired. We'd also love to see a "line in" jack on a device like this; the speaker is such a premium we'd love to be able to extend its functionality to other devices, like our video iPod, which lack speakers of their own.
The one thing we had to train Z not to do with the Sandisk Shaker was hold the speaker up to her ear. A could of quick reminders and she was good to go, but we could see other young children having the same impulse, and the maximum volume Sandisk established for this product is appropriate for projecting out from the device but not for listening to it at such a short range.
Overall, we are extremely pleased with the Sansa Shaker. Its design and basic features make it a great MP3 player for young children, and its price is quite reasonable - under $40 for the 1G version and under $30 for the 512K, with the included SD cards alone worth $15 to $20. Using an SD card also means its memory is compatible with other devices we use - cameras, Palm devices, etc. - so a significant chunk of the product's value is portable.
Z has carried this thing around off and on for weeks now, and listens to audio stories on it while eating breakfast almost every morning, an alternative to TV we're very comfortable with. She still finds manipulating some of the buttons a challenge, which is why we'd highly recommend this product for kids ages four and up, and for three-year-olds for adventurous techies who like to play with their kids' toys.
We will be giving away our Sansa Shaker in a couple of weeks - and we'll have an exciting reason for the delay. Look for a big announcement from ZRecs on or around Oct. 15!
The Sansa Shaker is available from Amazon.com in 512K and 1G versions for about $30-$40.  |
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