Sansa Fuze MP3 Player

Fresh off the success of the Clip and View MP3 players, Sansa has released the Fuze to fill the gap between the two in their model line. With a slightly larger size and with more storage capacity than the Clip, but with a smaller screen and lower price than the View, the Fuze aims to offer the best of both worlds.

The Fuze is an aggressively priced, full-featured portable MP3 and video player that packs a whole lot of functionality into a small package. With a lower price than a comparable iPod Nano, how does the Sansa Fuze stack up? Read on to find out.

Design and Features

The Sansa Fuze is a red colored portable audio and video player that is constructed of a hard plastic back plate with a sort of rubbery material coating, and a glossy plastic face. The use of the rubber material on the back is very useful since it is very resistant to scratching, and it also does a nice job of keeping the Fuze from sliding around on flat surfaces. The glossy front face is fairly resistant to scratching, but you will need to be careful if you carry it around in your pocket with your keys or any other sharp objects – it will start to show scratches and nicks otherwise. Other color choices - including blue, black, pink and silver - are also available.

The Fuze features a photo viewer, FM radio, voice recorder, MicroSD/SDHC expansion slot and a video viewer. It sports a 1.9” screen with 64k color display and a resolution of 224x176 pixels. It includes either 2GB, 4GB or 8GB of built-in memory and the MicroSD slot allows you to expand the available storage space even further.

The Fuze is a middle-of-the-road sized player, with a solid feel from its modest weight of 2.1 oz. While its size of 3.1” H x 1.9” W x .3” D would not allow it to fit into a wallet, it is easily portable as it would fit easily into a jacket pocket or a purse. Control of the unit is handled by the click-wheel, with a single button in the middle of the click-wheel. The power button is placed on the right side of the player, and doubles as the “Hold” button as well to keep the locked into the on or off position.

Also included is a built-in microphone for voice recording in WAV format, but it does not include any built-in speaker. Music, videos and picture files can be transferred from your PC or laptop to the Fuze via the included USB cable. Supported audio file types include MP3, WMA, secure WMA, WAV, Audible and MPEG4 for videos. Unfortunately, JPG image files are not supported.

Power is supplied by the built-in rechargeable lithium-ion battery. The battery is rated to last for 5 hours of video playback and 24 hours of audio playback.

In the Box

• Fuze 4GB player
• Stereo earbuds
• USB cable
• Rhapsody software disk
• User manuals

Out of the Box Setup

The first tasks after opening the box were to charge the player and sync it with my MP3 library. I chose not to use the included Rhapsody disc to install the software, as I do not have any interest in subscribing to another MP3 service. The sync to my current music library went without a hitch, and after about 2 hours of charge time the Fuze was ready to go.

I should note that the option to automatically sync the player with my library was given when I first attached it to my laptop, but I chose to manually copy my music. I chose to do this to keep enough space on the Fuze for some photo and video files, as my music library is quite extensive and the 4GB of internal memory would have been quickly filled if I had chosen to automatically sync my entire music library.

User Interface

After transferring the files, I spent some time through the menu options and the various elements of the user interface. A great user interface is pretty much a requirement for any portable media player to be successful, and in my testing I found that the Fuze has a very streamlined and simple to use user interface. Menu items for Music, Video, Photos, FM radio, Voice and Settings are all available in the main set of menu items. Scrolling is done by using the click-wheel and selecting an item is done using the single button in the middle of a click-wheel. The only other button on the face of the unit is the Home button, which takes you back to the main set of menu items. Overall, the tactile feel of the click-wheel and the buttons is quite nice and is very easy to use.

Navigation down from one menu to sub-menus and then back up again is quite easy, and the user interface for playing music and videos is quite intuitive. I had no trouble finding songs that I wanted or organizing my music into playlists, favorites or highly rated. Moving from one menu to the next was fast and response time after clicking the button was quite fast, as was the response time between clicking on a song and actually have it start playing.

The only issue that I ran into with the user interface is that the player locked up when I tried to delete a photo that was in JPG file format. While syncing the player with my laptop, I inadvertently copied over some photos in JPG format and needed to delete them from the Fuze. While trying to delete them the player locked up and I had to power off in order to get back to the main menu, which was unfortunate.