Sandisk Sansa Fuze review

The design of SanDisk's Sansa Fuze clearly owes a lot to Apple's third-generation iPod Nano.

It's a similar size and, like the iPod, has a horizontal screen, so you don't have to turn it sideways to watch videos. This little player is cheaper than the Nano, though, and has some extra features. A microSDHC card slot allows you to add more storage capacity and there's a built-in FM radio and microphone. You can record from either source to the internal memory.

The interface is the same as that of the larger Sansa View. A control wheel allows you to scroll through tracks and cycle through large, sleek-looking icons on the main menu screen to get to each of the player's functions. Most of the buttons are incorporated into the wheel.

The horizontal screen proved a real advantage for watching video, but SanDisk's conversion software was awkward to use and its video codec support was inconsistent. We were able to convert most WMV files, but while some AVI and MP4 files were also successfully converted, the converter rejected many others and claimed that they required unspecified missing codecs.

Unlike the Sansa View, the Fuze can't play WMV or MP4 video files. It's annoyingly specific: it can only handle MPEG4-encoded, fully interleaved AVI files at a resolution of 224x176, at no more than 20 frames per second and with a bit rate of 512KB/s or less. This set of criteria is so unusual that we were unable to produce viewable videos using our usual conversion tools. It was almost impossible to predict which videos SanDisk's own converter would accept, making the entire process very frustrating.

It's less restrictive when playing audio files, but it cannot handle uncommon formats such as OGG and FLAC, or even common ones such as unprotected AAC files. Standard MP3, WMA and Wav files all play, as do Audible audio book files and copy-protected WMA-DRM files. Audio quality was clear, but we recommend replacing the headphones. You can sort audio files by the ususal ID3 tag fields or by rating, but we'd have liked to browse the player's contents by folder, too.

The Sansa Fuze is good at what it does. Its audio quality, video quality and interface were all up to scratch. It's a bit cheaper than the 4GB iPod Nano, but has a smaller screen and slightly less polished interface. We liked the ability to drag and drop files to the player without complicated music-management software. Battery life was decent at 26 hours when listening to music.

However, the limited video and audio format support was disappointing, given that other SanDisk players can handle a wider range of file types. This is a good MP3 player, but not a great one.