SanDisk Sansa e260R

Once you've purchased Rhapsody tracks (at 89 cents a pop), you can burn them to CD, which also lets you continue to listen to them on the player if you cancel your membership. If for some reason you don't like Rhapsody, a setting lets you switch to PlaysForSure mode, where the player behaves like the regular Sansa e260 and works with online stores such as Napster, Urge, and Yahoo.

The Rhapsody software syncs only music to the player. To upload photos and videos, you must use the included SanDisk Media Converter, which converts them to its own format. Annoyingly, the player doesn't natively support any standard image or video formats, not even JPEG.

The e260R has a built-in FM tuner and you can record live radio, though there's no timer for scheduling recordings. The headphone's cord acts as an antenna, and reception can vary as you move around. The tiny built-in microphone works well for voice recording. Unlike with many audio players, you can change the e260R's battery yourself; a $20 battery kit even includes a screwdriver for easy removal of the four small screws on the back of the player. That's worth remembering when a salesperson tries to justify Best Buy's $30 two-year product-replacement plan.

In our audio-quality tests, the e260R fared no better than the regular e260. It received a very low score in our frequency-response test, where we play a sequence of tones from 20 Hz to 20 kHz and measure the deviation between them. Music didn't sound as lively as it did on other players when I listened through a good pair of headphones.

The Sansa e260R would be a great player for sampling a constantly changing blend of music from Rhapsody's $15 monthly service. However, the player's low audio quality and uncomfortable thumbwheel make it hard to recommend.

Paul Jasper