I plugged in my usual reference headphones – a pair of Grado SR325is to ensure there was no quality bottleneck and fired up Radiohead’s ”Hail To The Thief” to see how the player could deal with the band’s complex, swirling guitars and convoluted melodies. The View, too, wasn’t the last word in sound quality, and again the Fuze offers little redress.
SANSA DISK FUZE UPDATE
– A firmware update has now added official support for Flac and Ogg on the Clip and Fuze.)
SANSA DISK FUZE PLUS
You can play back MP3 and WMA at bitrates up to 320Kb/sec plus Audible’s audio book format, but not AAC files as you can with the View, and there’s no support for Ogg Vorbis either (Ed. It failed to include support for lossless formats such as Flac, Apple Lossless and WMA Lossless, and the Fuze is the same. Its bigger brother, the View, disappointed when it came to audio format support.
SANSA DISK FUZE WINDOWS
It’s compatible with both MSC and MTP methods of file transfer, so you can use it with Windows Media Player to transfer DRM WMA tracks, or you can simply drag unprotected tracks and videos straight to the relevant locations if you prefer.īut the real challenge for the Fuze is in music playback, and it has a lot to live up to here. The Fuze also has an external mic so you can turn it into a dictaphone or basic podcast recorder, and one more area where the Fuze has the nano beat is in its flexibility.
The Fuze steadily improves with the inclusion of an FM tuner – one that works pretty well too – and memory expansion in the shape of a microSD card slot. That said, it’s still extremely effective and when coupled with the Fuze’s excellent mechanical clickwheel – debuted on the View – it makes the Fuze a delight to use. The nano boasts a search facility and that fancy coverflow artwork browsing, while the Fuze’s is far more perfunctory. The Fuze can’t match the nano in terms of video features, then, so how does it fare elsewhere? First up, though I like SanDisk’s interface, I have to admit that Apple’s still has the edge.
SANSA DISK FUZE DOWNLOAD
However, SanDisk does provide a free video converter tool for download from its website, which works very well and is easy to use. And, apart from the fact that the quality isn’t as good – colours aren’t quite as natural and it’s much more prone to reflections than the nano’s screen – it doesn’t support smooth 30fps video, forcing you to convert clips to a lowly, and much less watchable, 15fps.įormat support is limited to MPEG-4 files at native screen resolution too – a far cry from the excellent video support of the View, which supports WMV and MPEG-4 files at more than the native resolution of the screen (640 x 320). The 1.9in screen, for instance, has a much lower resolution (220 x 176 pixels) than the QVGA (320 x 240 pixels) one found on the nano. It isn’t quite as soap-bar slippery as the nano.Ĭapacities go up to 8GB – the same as the nano – and even battery life is the same, quoted at 24 hours for music and five hours for video, but from here on the two players begin to diverge. Arguably the rubbery finish and slightly thicker profile makes it more comfortable to operate one handed, too. The Fuze is still a very nicely designed player, though, with a soft-touch rubberised rear and glossy front (available in more colours than just black, for the style conscious). It isn’t as slim as the Nano, though, at 7.3mm compared to 6.5mm and it still can’t quite match the Apple player’s sense of style. The Fuze is slightly narrower, width-wise than the nano and a little taller too. A landscape 1.9in screen sits above a circular control cluster, with even the sync and headphone connections in the same place, ranged along the bottom edge. The Fuze is almost identical in proportion to the nano, complete with short/fat profile. If imitation really is the sincerest form of flattery, then the nano can feel itself well and truly idolised.
Now that the Fuze is finally here, however, SanDisk at last has a direct competitor to Apple’s most popular player. The View was simply too big to rival its pocketability and the Clip too cheap and chirpy. We had the View months ago and the brilliant Clip, but neither took on the anodised iPod head on. Surprisingly, though, it has taken SanDisk nearly a year to respond to Apple’s ‘new’ squat nano. And Sansa players such as the venerable e-series and the more recent View have always crammed the features in. Over the years they’ve managed to couple great value with decent usability and pretty slick design too. SanDisk’s MP3 players have long been the popular alternative to Apple’s all-conquering iPod players.
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