Disassembling the Sandisk Sansa Sanmeister

I bought a Sandisk Sansa e260 from woot.com recently, even though I agree that the mp3 player is an obsolete technology. I really like the UI. They copied Apple's click wheel design, but used an actual plastic wheel that spins (instead of the stationary touch-sensitive wheel Apple uses.) I actually prefer it because of the physical feedback you get from spinning it.

It has a small, sleek design, very bright display, and does a great job at all it's tasks: video playback, photo slideshows, music, radio, voice recording, 4GiB USB drive.

Also, Sansa let's you use the USB Mass Storage Device Driver to copy music, instead of enforcing MTP like they did on previous players. MTP completely sucks in comparison.

The downsides: custom cable. Why does anything have a custom cable? Everything should use the USB mini-b so we don't need to keep 20 cables on our desk to plug in all our gadgets.

My particular e260 also had a problem: only 1 channel of audio would play. I took it apart to see if I could fix it. Disassembling things is always fun. Here are the pictures:



The electronics in this thing are tiny. Almost all of the weight is in the heavy steel case back and the battery, and almost all of the volume is in the frame & battery. I had fun pushing the battery back onto the power terminals and running it naked:



I eventually decided the problem was in the stereo headphone socket, which has 3 conductors for left audio channel, right audio channel, and a common return (see TRS connector). Looking down into the socket, I can see that a contactor is broken off. I couldn't get a focused image with my digicam though. Here's a shot of the back of the electronics, at least:

I think that the stereo socket needs replacing, and I'm not going to try to remove and solder a new one in place. I hope Sandisk will do it for me. I wonder if there were any hidden warranty-voiding stickers that I broke when taking it apart . . .