It is said that ?an apple a day, keeps the doctor away!? I am not speaking for the doctors but now a days Apple has definitely not been able to keep the other PMPs from hitting the market and making their presence felt.
The new entrant that has stirred the personal music space is from the stable of flash memory giants SanDisk and is called Sansa Fuze. One needn?t even open the box to fathom Fuze?s resemblance with Apple ?Nano?. It almost amazed me as I connected the provided ear-buds and played the preloaded sample music, that the resemblance also echoed down to the audio play-back quality.
The business card size little FUZE measuring just 3.1 X 1.9 X 0.3 inches could actually pump real loud music. Though with the provided ear-buds it lacked on thumping lows (bass) but rest of the audio spectrum was nice and rich, specially the vocals. The mid and the high frequencies were rather impressively reproduced. Once I connected my Bose ear-buds to the FUZE, the whole world changed. Every single note in the spectrum came out loud and rich. The only place where it lagged a bit was that thumping. But it did more than makeup by its smooth rendering of vocals.
Almost half the metallic finish real-estate on the face of the FUZE is taken by a very bright 1.9 inch screen that displays a very decent but slightly choppy video due to 20 FPS playback. The rest houses a smooth clickable navigation wheel encircled by a soft blue ring light and a menu button. The ring-light glows as you operate the wheel along with the display screen. A micro SD card slot to extend the memory and an inbuilt microphone are placed on the left side of the device. The rubberised non-skid metal back cover gives it a very solid and sleek built and feel.
The proprietary USB slot and 3.5 mm headphone jack slot are on the base of the FUZE and do not interfere with general functioning. The Sansa Fuze supports playback of a wide range of popular music formats like MP3, WAV, Audible (for audio books) and Windows Media Audio (WMA) in both unprotected and protected files apart from displaying MPEG-4 videos and JPEG photos. The in-built programmable digital FM radio and a voice recorder transform it in to a very useful device.
It supports ?drag and drop? to upload music but for that one has to download a media converter software from the Sansa site, provided one is a PC with Windows XP SP2/3 or Vista Operating systems. Its internal rechargeable battery is claimed to play up to 24 hours of audio and five hours of video between charges. But you have to use the provided proprietary USB cable and charge it through a PC or Laptop only. I would have preferred a separate AC adopter instead. The Sansa FUZE players comes in a 2GB capacity (MRP of Rs 5490), 4GB (Rs 6890) and 8GB (Rs 8999) and a variety of colors like red, pink, blue, black and silver.