Thanks to a review at anythingbutipod, I bought Ness a pink Sansa Clip. It is pretty, small, sounds good and cost £25. She likes it a lot.
It did have some problems with Ubuntu and with OGG support. I fixed both with a firmware upgrade.
Out of the box, the Clip only supports
USB MTP mode; rather than the usual
UMS USB mode, where the Clip is recognised as a drive. Apparently, this is because MTP is better at avoiding data corruption. Unfortunately it is also more fiddly under Linux and gives you less control over the device.
Luckily the new firmware gives you UMS mode, but I had to work this all out for myself. I wrote a
small howto and threw it up on the Ubuntu Wiki.