Review: Sandisk Sansa Fuze portable music player

Sandisk, known for its memory cards, also has a fair pedigree in portable music players, and it recently updated its range with the new Sansa Fuze.

The Fuze slots in between the View and Clip, its larger and smaller brothers, and will appeal to those who like the compact size of the iPod Nano.

The Fuze adopts many of the same features as the other current Sandisk models, with a mechanical scroll wheel, black plastic case and memory that can be added to by slotting in a memory card (it takes Micro SD cards).

The interface hasn’t changed much from previous players, offering straightforward access to music, video and photo playback, along with an FM radio and voice recorder.

Each of these features is pretty basic, and though this makes them straightforward to use, they pale in comparison to the degree of control offered by Sony or Apple players. As it is, you get basic control of audio with a customisable equaliser, and orientation and brightness controls for video. Quality was reasonable without being particularly impressive, though things did improve when we replaced the supplied earphones with a better pair.

With high capacities on offer (8GB costs only £100) users will be forgiven for wanting to load the device with a decent collection of video clips, but they will have to use Sandisk’s Media Converter to do this.

It’s a straightforward application that works well, but it does take some time to process files, so it's easy to become frustrated with having to do it each time you want to watch something new. Thankfully, photos and music can simply be dragged and dropped across from Windows, and you can also record FM broadcasts directly to the internal memory.

The Fuze is a great player for those who are looking for straightforward operation and aren’t too bothered about having a great deal of control over media. As is typical of Sandisk it’s very good value for money in comparison to rivals, and considering you can up the capacity with a memory card it is a great way to keep a collection of music.