Sansa FuzeThe Sansa Fuze is advertised as "Linux friendly" because it supports OGG, FLAC and can mounted as a mass storage device, so it can be used in virtually any operating system. It comes in either 2GB, 4GB or 8GB sizes in five different colours: Red, black, silver, blue and pink. I went for black, because there was a good deal for a black 8GB Fuze with a 4GB microSD card bundled with it for only £50.00!

Features

The Fuze has a nice simple interface, which can be navigated easily. It can play just about every file format you can throw at it including MP3, OGG, FLAC, (with upgraded firmware), WMA and more. Unfortunately it only supports a strange AVI file format for videos. The file converter Sandisk provide is good, but unfortunately it isn't available for Linux. It can also display photos as a gallery, and you can also choose to do a slideshow. You can set background music, how frequently the picture changes, and you can also delete pictures one by one.

The scroll wheel is like the one on the iPod Nano, but this one is mechanical, so it actually clicks when you turn it round. Surrounding this click wheel is a blue light, which looks very stylish. The screen is good, but it is quite reflective, so it's harder to see outside. Turning up the brightness can make it a little bit more easier to read.

The buttons on there are a play/pause button on the top, a previous button, a next button, a button at the bottom and a home button. Holding down either the previous or back button will rewind or fast forward respectively. Pressing the home button will go to the main menu, and pressing it again will go back to showing what music is playing. Turning the scroll whell will change the volume and go up and down lists.

One killer feature, which is a bit of a rarity, is the FM tuner. I managed to get very good quality out of it.

The battery life is advertised as 24 hours, but that's only if you put it on the minimum brightness and put the volume low...

The back is rubbery, so it can be gripped very well. The front is very glossy.

The earphones provided are not that great. They are better than most that are bundled with MP3 players, but they're not really that good.

The sound quality is spectacular! No crackling, distortion or anything like that. It's amazing that such a small device can give such amazing sound quality.

There is a little mic on the side, which I expected to be rubbish, but when I tried recording something I was very surprised. It was very good. You can record for up to 12 hours. Why you would ever need that long I'll never know, but you can't have too much right?

Connections/Inputs

It features a proprietary connector unfortunately. It would be very good if it was a mini USB connection instead. There is a standard 3.5mm headphone jack for connecting your favourite earphones/headphones to.

When connecting the Fuze into a USB port, it is a bit slow, but it may be because of a bug in the Linux kernel...hopefully it will be fixed soon. Using it in Windows gives me nice fast speeds.

Something that isn't in many MP3 players, including the iPod Nano, is a microSD card slot. It can take up to 8GB as far as I know (it may be higher) but that's quite a lot. There's also a cool bonus. You just stick a microSD card in, and it gets automatically integrated into your music library! Couldn't be simpler.

There is no charger included in the box, but neither do many other MP3 players. You have to charge it through the USB. But if you search around the internet, there are plently of plug chargers available for prices as low as £5.00.

Final Verdict

Sound quality
8/10 - Outstanding sound quality for such a small size

Looks
7/10 - Not as stylish as the iPod Nano, but still quite good looking

Features
8/10 - Could be better if it supported more video formats

Battery life
9/10 - Not as high as advertised, but still very good

The Sansa Fuze is a very good MP3 player, and could rival the iPod Nano. The thing that brings it down is the bad video support. But for only £50.00 - less than half the price of the Nano, it's great if you're on a budget. Highly recommended.