The Fuze is easy to use. Even user new to digital music players will be able to perform all the major functions easily. The Main Menu choices, shown in Figure 7, include Music, Voice, FM Radio, Photos, Videos, Rhapsody Channels, and Settings. Like most digital music players, the Fuze lets you look up music by song, artist, album, genre, playlists, and top-rated. The Fuze does not have alphabet letters that appear on the screen as you scroll through your music as you find on the Microsoft Zune. While this is helpful if you have a lot of music, you won’t miss it if you have a limited collection of music.
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Figure 7: The Main Menu.
One of the best things about the Fuze is that you can increase the storage with a MicroSD card. Unlike the Creative Zen, the music from the card is fully integrated with the music on device’s internal memory. When you view the music on your computer you can see where the music is located (internal memory or external card). However, when you are using the Fuze, the music is integrated so that a song will be listed under the proper artist whether it is on the device’s internal memory or any your SC card. Kudos to Sansa on this. This is the way an add-on memory card should work!
The Fuze supports MP3, WMA, secure WMA, WAV, and MPEG4. It also handles audio books and podcasts in the AA & AA4 (Audible), WMA, WAV, and MP3 file formats. In addition to the usual audio formats mentioned here, the Fuze also supports OGG, an open source audio encoding and FLAC, a free lossless audio codec. While this might not mean much to the average user, audio-phoebes will be excited to see this type of support, which is unusual for MP3 players.
The sound quality of the Fuze is excellent and it also has support for EQ.
The FM radio is clear and easy to use and comes with the ability to have 40 preset stations. If you plan on using the radio a lot, you may want to try out different headphones because they act as the antennae for FM reception. The Fuze has a nice feature in that it allows you to record FM radio for future playback. You cannot schedule recordings, but you can start a recording and set duration. Those addicted to a certain radio show will certainly find this feature enticing. Adding the ability to schedule recordings would make this a must-have device for FM lovers. The FM recordings are stored as a WAV file on the main memory, so you must have enough room for them on the device.
The voice recorder lets you make voice recordings quite easily. These are also stored in the WAV format. The recordings are named by date and time of recording. Both radio and voice recordings can be easily transferred to the computer.
The Sansa screen is not as crisp as it could be. It is certainly adequate for making menu choices and viewing pictures. Video playback is adequate, but not impressive. Yet, with the small screen size, most will not be using this player for serious video playback. Luckily the screen brightness can be changed in the Settings menu. Although this will use more battery power, it will help screen readability and is a necessary adjustment for viewing in sunlight. The Sansa plays videos in the MPEG4 format. Although most videos played smoothly, several that played well on other players were slightly choppy on the Fuze.
Sansa rates the battery at 24 hours for audio and 5 hours for video. With the screen brightness at mid-level, the device consistently gave us will play for about 20-21 hours for audio. Like most other players of this size, the battery is not user-replaceable.
We would love to see the ability to personalize the player’s background as you can in the Microsoft Zune and some other players. The Fuze gives you only the ability to change the background color. However, given the slight lack of clarity of the screen, perhaps sticking to solid backgrounds is the best option.
Although some Sansa players have been plagued with stability issues, in several weeks of constant use, our Fuze performed admirable. It froze once, but simply turning it off and back on again returned it to normal.
