When I agreed to write a review about the SanDisk Sansa Shaker I thought, "how hard can it be? It's just another MP3 player!" And I guess that is the gotcha. It's hard to get exciting about another MP3 player. But when my 7 year old daughter came to me the other morning, asking me to put a new battery in the pink hourglass shaped player, I knew it was time to get this review finished.

I feel like my kids have enough toys that if they give a sidelong glance to a toy that is more than 3 weeks old, that toy must have some staying power. So my daughter asking me to put a battery in the Shaker makes me think that it has a certain je ne sais quoi. That says a lot for a device that can be purchased for $29.99 for the 512MB Model.

The pink Shaker arrived the day before we left for a road trip to Disneyland. My objective was to get it setup so that that the kids could put it through some tests while we traveled. Do you think I could figure out how to open the annoying thing? I almost lost my cool. Okay, I did loose my cool. but in the end I finally figured out how to unscrew one end which exposed the SD card slot, standard mini USB port and the AAA battery slot. After I figured that out, things were a breeze. For what it's worth, it's kind of like opening a child proof pill bottle, not a bad idea for a device targeted at children if you don't want them loosing the SD card, etc.

Once I figured out how to open the Shaker, I loaded the included 512MB SD card full of MP3's from my favorite Liverpudlians and set my kids loose with it. A number of the songs included on the SD card, no doubt in the public domain, were for a much younger audience than the device is targeted. They were quickly replaced by Strawberry Fields and Penny Lane.

Listening to music when you are seven and nine years old is a participatory sport. The Shaker has two headphone jacks, so both can listen at the same time without having to share left and right head phones. This is a great feature.

The Shaker gets it name from a couple of different aspects of the device. First off, it's hourglass design gives it the looks of a Shaker, salt shaker, pepper shaker, music shaker, you get the picture. Secondly, it has a unique system for randomly changing to the next song. You guessed it. You shake it (while pressing a button). The Shaker makes a sound effect and out comes the the next random song. The built in speaker is surprisingly loud and clear. And since the Shaker fits snuggly in a kids hand, they can also pretend to use it as a microphone.

In many ways this is the perfect first MP3 player for kids. It's well designed, well built and the price is right. Now if they could just figure out how to make it a little less "child proof". I really couldn't figure out how I was supposed to get into it.