SanDisk Sansa Fuze

SanDisk's Sansa Fuze is a neat-looking PMP that manages to combine good looks and plenty of multimedia features into a single device. Then again, most PMPs – even the more economical ones – have similar, if not identical, features. What makes a player worth buying is the functionality of those features, and easy navigation. Here are my findings after checking out the Sansa Fuze.

Form Factor
iPod Nano lookalike or not, the Fuze looks good. It has a 1.9 inch TFT with a resolution of 220 x 176 pixels, which is fine – it could have been better. I was most impressed by the jog wheel, which makes navigation very smooth. It has four points on the wheel for accessing various functions, and a separate Home key to access the main menu.

On one side of this slim player is the power slider / hold key for locking the buttons. A microSD slot is located on the other side. Even though the Fuze comes with 2GB of onboard flash memory, having an option for external memory is definitely a bonus. A proprietary USB/charging port is located on the bottom, along with a 3.5mm earphone socket. The bundled earphones are quite comfortable to wear. On the whole I’d say the design is great.

Features and Performance
I can understand the need for video conversion, but the player can't even handle normal JPEG images with a resolution of 2592 x 1944. So, while you can forget about viewing images taken from a 5MP camera phone or digicam, 3MP and lower are fine. No compression or conversion is required for images with a resolution of 2048 x 1536; you can simply copy-paste them into the device or insert a card. Other images with larger resolutions will need to be converted using the media converter software that’s bundled with the player.

Video playback, though smooth, tends to be obviously a bit pixelated due to the display resolution. But it’s not bad. You might want to seriously reconsider watching full-length movies though. Short video clips or music videos are quite all right. A great feature of the video player is the ability to resume playback from where you stopped, even when it's switched off and turned on.