A few weeks ago, a lady representing SanDisk came to me and wondering if I could review their latest MP3 player - the Sandisk Sanza Fuse - if I was to give it an honest review. My current MP3 player is a paltry 512k number, so I jumped at the chance.
Last week, it arrived, and I have been using it all weekend. What are my thoughts?
Well, first impressions were that it was very well made, the box didn’t hugely sell it well - it looked a little like one of the cheap products you get off your standard market - but that has been the only complaint. It is sleek and is smaller than my current mp3 player, with a bright screen and vivid colours, and a large 1.9″ screen.
Getting my music onto the device was really straightforward. No itunes esque programme, just drag and drop it into the relevant folder. This suits my use down to a tee, as I don’t like polluting my computer with software. It’s awesome.
When they are on there, it’s pretty much a standard iPod esque interface, and for good reason - it works. Your music can be easily found, and played. Want to hear a number of songs? Then line them up, and you can listen to them. The sound quality is excellent, I thought my Zen was good, this surpasses it.
Video was a little bit of a struggle however. Being a man, I tried and repeated the drag and drop I did for the music, but it didn’t work. So after struggling I returned to the manual, and read that the manual is on the CD. The CD is one of those silly “half CD’s”, so after opening the PDF manual, I found out that you need to download the media converter from a website. Why doesn’t it include it on the CD?
Anyway, I did download, and the media converter is rather easy to use. You simply plug in your MP3 player to the USB connector, drag the movies you want converting into a standard it can understand, hit “convert”, and you are away. After a short while, you can view your videos on the screen. Admittedly it’s not an Imax Cinema, but it is certainly watchable, and my personal opinion better than most.
So overall, would I buy one. Well, yes. Their £50/$100 cheaper than the iPod Classic (which it’s trying to emulate), and - whilst the amount of memory in them is a lot smaller (8 gB is the biggest), you can expand it using MicroSD cards. As Sandisk also make Micro SD cards, you can be sure that they work with it, so overall - it is cheaper. Add to that the fantastic sound, the suitable movie playback, good battery life (24 hours Audio, 5 hours Video) and the fact you can use it as an MP3 player without installing any spyware or DRM inducing vomit (sorry, still don’t trust iTunes in that respect), for 50 notes less than Apples offering. Then I would heartedly consider this thing.
If you’re looking for a new MP3 player, the you can do a lot worse than Sandisk Sansa Fuze.
Click here to buy the SanDisk Sansa Fuze on Amazon
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Rhys Wynne, the author of this blog, is a 20 something web designer from Colwyn Bay.
are you honestly saying that thing gives 24 hours audio playback? thats an insane battery if thats even anywhere near true!!
and as for polluting ur pc with software… what do u use to listen to music? nothing against the product ur promoting but surely you have to see the light of day on the new ipods……
Looks like a pretty good. Wouldn’t work for me though as I have at least 15 GBs or so so far on mine. I do need a new one though. Mine is getting old.
yes its 50£ less than an ipod but your getting a max of 8gig vs 80/160 for 50£ more thats a rip off in my books - it doesn’t even compare!
i doubt that it will do 24 hours straight. maybe 22 or somewhere around that ballpark, but anything above 20 is a feat already. had i not fell for the zune hype, i would’ve gotten this instead in a heartbeat