Sandisk Sansa Shaker

Had you looked at the Sandisk Sansa Shaker many years ago you would have rightly assumed that if you turned it upside down it would moo.

Technology has moved on since then, so it's time to equip your kids with the Shaker to reproduce barnyard noises -- we are of course referring to any given song by Christina Aguilera.

Other than its bright colour and looking like a miniature bongo drum, the other kid-friendly feature is a per-track randomisation option, used by holding the play/pause button and shaking the player. It’s safe to assume a mercury tilt switch takes care if the job. Sliding forward and reverse transport controls are provided at the base of the unit, which skip through tracks or shuttle through the song if you hold them to one side. Moving through a song is painfully slow (merely twice the speed of regular playback) and gives you no audible reference to know where you are in the song until you start playing it again.

A speaker is mounted in the top of the unit to drive you insane as you are regaled with The Very Best of Peter Combe The Wiggles for the 4.8 x 10^9th time. Truly this is the lesser of two evils compared to 50 Cent being imposed on you by a mobile phone wielding teenager on the train. The sound the speaker produces is expectedly tinny, but then again audio fidelity isn’t exactly at the top of the list of priorities in the mind of a 6 year old.

The audio quality through the headphone outputs is appalling, even through a pair of Sennheiser HD280 Pro monitoring headphones. A single pair of bud headphones is provided, however the shaker has two 3.5mm jacks in each side to (hopefully) end fights over who gets to listen. Plugging a pair of headphones into either output will mute the speaker.

The base of the unit twists off to reveal an SD card slot (filled with a 512MB card in our test unit), AAA battery container (AAA battery included) and a Mini-USB connector (cable included). We broke ours after 2 twists. Kids won’t even need to look at it before they break theirs, but luckily a small piece of string will keep the base attached when it falls off. The shape isn't exactly pocket friendly, but you can attach a small included carabina to it.

The Shaker behaves as a removable drive when synched and plays back MP3 and WAV files. A blue LED ring flashes to indicate if the player is on, and the only other thing that’s out of the ordinary are the insertion of sound effects into ROM that play back whenever a critical event happens, such as power on and off, shuffle and SD card removal.

If the novelty value of the Sandisk Shaker appeals, then its numerous flaws will quickly fade into insignificance.