5. Internet Radio Or All Your Content

The Sansa Connect is surprisingly bulky for a 4 GB player, yet its size is reasonable considering it brings you a wide selection of Internet radio and Yahoo! It’s not quite on-demand music, but it’s delightfully simple and a very different way of thinking about exploring a subscription service just to listen to music you already like and probably already own. You can’t fit all the music you have onto either of these devices and the recommendations and mixes you get with the Connect are an interesting alternative to the random playlists iTunes offers for small-capacity media players.

Archos gives you unusually detailed mix-and-match options with the 605 WIFI; if you don’t want to watch DVD-encoded content to browse the Web you don’t have to pay for it, but if you want the full experience you’ll have to budget for more than the basic price. Depending on which camp you fall into you’ll feel you’re making a saving or getting nickel-and-dimed to death - and even icons you’re not paying for stay in the interface. Once you’ve paid for all the features you want to use, the 605 WIFI is a very powerful device. The battery life is only reasonable but the screen quality is excellent and the audio quality is hard to beat.

The interface doesn’t match the simplicity of the Sansa Connect - and it’s far more complicated than that of the iPod; the video player screen is just too busy with all the controls up and we’d like a way of jumping back to favorite shared folders on other devices. But the 605 WIFI is wireless done right. Synching or playing content wirelessly is just like synching over a cable or playing content on the device, except that you don’t have the hassle of plugging in. You also have access to far more content than you could fit on the player.

More than the difference in physical size or capacity, comparing the Sansa Connect with the Archos 605 WIFI is the choice between simplicity and power. Do you want a wireless connection to get rid of a cable or to bring you a different way of listening?

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