Sansa Fuze MP3 Player Review

The Hardware

As shown in Figure 3, the main controls are on the front of the Fuze. They consist of a raised scroll wheel with a nicely defined selection button in the middle and a home button that takes you to the Main Menu choices. The scroll wheel is responsive and easy to use. The top of the wheel is a Play/Pause and scroll up area. The bottom scrolls down a list of choices and gives you submenu and option choices. The left side of the scroll wheel will rewind or take you to a previous selection and the right side will take you to the next selection or go forward. You can also turn the wheel to make your selections.

Figure 3: The Front of the Fuze.

The right side of the Fuze, as shown in Figure 4, has a small toggle switch. Pushing it toward the bottom of the device will hold (lock) the controls.  Pushing it toward up to the middle position will unlock the device. Pushing the toggle toward the top of the device will turn the player on and off. While this may sound a bit complicated, it is really intuitive and easy to use.

Figure 4: The right side of the Fuze.

The bottom of the Fuze, shown in Figure 5, has a port for the proprietary USB sync/charge cable and a standard headphone port. The left side of the device, shown in Figure 6, has a place where you can increase the storage by adding a MicroSD card. The Fuze can accommodate both microSD and microSDHC cards up to 16 GB. Next to the card opening is a small microphone.

Figure 5: The Bottom of the Fuze.

Figure 6: The Left side of the Fuze.