Sansa Fuze

All my readers should know by now how much I love music. Once there is a new media player in town, I'm on it like a hawk.

This week, Tech Savvy turns the spotlight on the Sansa Fuze, made by SanDisk. There was a gap that needed to be filled in the product line in-between the Sansa Clip and the Sansa View. In stepped the Fuze, with a bigger screen, increased capacity and a memory slot compared to the Clip.

Enough with the chit-chat, let's see what this baby can do.

Pros

Great sound quality.

Solid design.

Good radio.

Improved screen over previous models.

Improved user interface responsiveness over previous models.

Cons

Weak video playback.

Photo support limited to smaller files.

Can only bookmark videos.

Design

The Sansa Fuze is a mid-range price media player from SanDisk. The size of the Fuze is right in-between the View and the Clip, with dimensions of 1.9 inches wide by 0.3 inches thick and 3.1 inches tall.

The Fuze only weighs a couple of ounces, so this player is definitely built for portability. It will easily fit into your shirt or pant pocket.

It also comes with a wheel that is similar to the View's, but it is made of lighter plastic, which enhances the design. Wheel rotation is smooth and has very subtle bumps for each list or menu movement. So far, this is the best wheel on Sansa products to date.

Battery

The battery is rated at 24 hours for audio. I have been getting about 19-21 hours under normal use. I have noticed that turning the screen brightness down can really help battery life.

Video playback seems short at just under four hours, well shy of five hours rated.

Conclusion

The SanDisk Sansa Fuze is a great buy. It has slim design, simple interface, ample features, memory-expansion capability and solid sound quality all wrapped up in an easy-to-swallow price tag. I'm proud to give the SanDisk Sansa Fuze four out of a possible five stars.

Product reviewed provided by Royale Computers and Accessories; telephone#: 906-1067, 906-1068,749-5579.

Radio

The reception is as good as radio reception gets and the auto programme feature carefully selects only the clear stations. Your mileage may vary by what headphones you used since they act as the antennas for reception. The Fuze can record radio in WAV format. The function is very basic, but has the ability to set the duration of the recording. Possibly handy for recording your favourite morning radio shows.

Voice recording

Like FM, Voice recording uses WAV format, but does not have the ability to set the duration of the recording. The feature works well and picks up sound well from the mic located right below the microSD slot.

Photo viewer

This feature works like any other photo viewer having basic list or thumbnail view mode. For each folder, you have in the photo directory on the internal memory or on the microSD card, it will show as an album.

Video

If you are looking for good video support, look elsewhere. Granted it is a big improvement over the e200, but the Fuze's low-power processor requires the video format to be rather bloated. The format used is a 20FPS DivX format at the 224x176 screen resolution, which takes about 6MB per minute of video, so typical movies will approach around 1GB each.

Music

The music menu is organised, as usual, like any other, with artiste, album, song, genre, and set-up options. It also includes a 'recently added' menu item for the last songs transferred to the player and a 'top-rated' section that will show songs with four and five stars.