Easily the best Sansa To Date

Having hated for a long time the I-Pod's proprietary nature and the inability to use I-Pod's with subscription music services such as Rhapsody, I have been a long time Sansa Owner. Starting with the cheaply constructed M240, moving to an E200R series for it's Rhapsody Channels functionality, finally to the Fuze for it's SDHC support.

This is by far the best quality Sandisk product available.

Roughly the same size as a 3rd Gen I-Pod Nano, you would be pressed to tell the difference between the two at more than 10 feet away. However, the Fuze has some great advantages over the I-Pod at a fraction of the price.

Available in 2, 4, and 8 GB capacities, the Fuze offers a wide variety of colors and capacities to suite your budget and sense of style. The 2 GB model comes in Black only. The 4GB comes in Pink, Red, Blue and the 8GB is currently only available in Silver.

The unit currently supports MP3, WMA, and WMA (protected) and Audible book formats.

However, due to it's MicroSD/HC slot, the Fuze can be expanded by an additional 8GB using widely available 8GB SDHC SDMicro cards. (Theoretically the Fuze will accept cards up to 32GB as they become available.

This expansion ability gives the player much more legs and the ability to grow as your music grows. You can also have a number of cards available depending on your music choice. I would, however, avoid changing out the cards in the car or somewhere where they might be lost, as the memory cards are roughly the size of a thumbnail and can easily get misplaced.

The GOOD:
In addition to the expansion capabilities, the Fuze uses the same Chipset that is employed on the Sansa Clip, which has received very positive reviews on it's performance.

The Interface is very simple to navigate with a dedicated home button which will take you to the main interface from any screen you are looking at.

The Wheel is very comfortable to use and has very slight detents which you can feel while scrolling so choosing individual items is very easy.

The 1.9 inch LCD screen is clear and bright and the high contrast font provides for very good readability even for my aging eyes.

The unit also comes with an FM tuner which provides some very fine reception for a unit of its self.

Rounding out the features is the ability to perform voice recording and downloading videos and pictures to the unit, as well as audiobook and non-drm podcast support.

However the most compelling feature of the unit is it's seamless integration with the Rhapsody Music Service. While a wide variety of players will support subscription based DRM tracks from the likes of Rhapsody and Napster, the Fuze does one better. It features a thing called Rhapsody Channels, which allow you to download a "channel" based on one of the genres in Rhapsody. This content is constantly changing. You can listen to it as long as you want to, but as soon as you connect to Rhapsody, it will update your channel and replace your listened to content with new content. If you really "like" a track, you can simply add it to your library and Rhapsody will not overwrite it, and the song will appear in your song list like any other title you have on the player. This is awesome for people who desire endless variety in their music.

Also handy is the little stoplight meter that reminds you when to sync up to Rhapsody to renew your subscription track licenses.

I wish Apple would do the same, but until then Rhapsody provides a much bigger bang for your buck by giving unlimited downloads to over 4 million tracks for only 14.99 a month. It's great, and this player is a great compliment to the service.

The BAD:

As good as all this sounds, there are some minor bugs in the machine. First and foremost is navigation. For some reason, the wheel will not allow you to loop through your song or album list. You have to reverse your spin to move back up the list. Now for a 2GB player, this doesn't seem like a big deal, but since these things have the capacity of having anywhere from 34GB to 40GB, then one can imagine the chore it takes to thumbwheel down to a song track like Xanadu by Rush, or Young Turks by Rod Stewart.
After scrolling that many tracks, my thumb is the most well defined part of my body. Hopefully a firmware upgrade in the near future will add the ability to scroll directly from A to Z and Z to A. In addition, a nice "acceleration" feature like the I Pod does which starts out scrolling by Letter, then by file when you slow down. Something has to be done, or else we'll never get to listen to songs at the bottom of our playlist when these things truly bloat out.

Another minor annoyance is the power switch. The E200 had a single button that you pressed and held to power on. On the Fuze it's incorporated in the "hold switch" and is just a slight pain to turn on because you still have to "hold it up" for a slight period of time to power on the unit. It's not "terrible" just not great. I'm worried that it might eventually wear out.

Also the center button of the unit clicks unnaturally loud, but that is really minor.

Another downer is the non-removable battery, but after my experience with the E200, the removable battery is more of a marketing tool than it is useful. LI-ION batteries naturally degrade, so when I "bought" a new battery on my E200, it had roughly the same life as my original battery, and since there is no way of determining the manufacturing date of the battery, you could get an older battery as well.

Due to it's fairly high rated life (approx 24 hour playback) the Fuze will be able to last well over 4 years before the battery becomes a huge concern.

Video playback is a bit of a hassle, as it relies on Sansa's Video Converter to convert the video and load it to the player. The output is fairly bloated compared to other compression standards out there. And the player's 1.9 inch screen is much more suited to watching 3 to 4 minute videos on it instead of full length movies. If you are looking to load your DVD's on this puppy, don't bother. It takes way too long, and the screen is not really up to the task.

THE UGLY:

Well, there really isn't anything ugly except some users have complained that the Fuze is not mountable or detected on certain flavors of OSX (Shock!!! Apple not supporting any other music device).

However, if you are a Windows user or any Linux user, you will find the player is quite easy to use and allows you to drag and drop content directly to the player whether it is in MSC mode or MTP mode. Using MTP mode allows for the loading of subscription content, and syncing with other managers such as Windows Media Player.

Overall this player is a great bargain for anyone who wants an I-Pod equavalent without being tied down to their architecture. An 8GB unit runs 129.00 with an 8GB MicroSD card available for approx 48 bucks, you get a 16GB player for less than an 8GB I-Pod Nano. The addition of the FM tuner should be really great for Gym users that have their TV feeds in the workout rooms broadcast over FM. The expandibility and long battery life make this an ideal basic player for anyone who is looking for a quality unit at a very moderate price.