Is there any hope at all for this player?

SanDisk MP3 players All other MP3 players
1

I bought my 16 GB Fuze+ along with a Sansa 32 GB card the day it hit Amazon In October 2010 for $213.03 shipped to my door.  Now, nearly a year and a half later the same purchase costs $135.89 and I have yet to have a single satisfactory experience with this player.  It is only barely usable, and by that I mean that I have put more effort into trying to use this player than the Sansa development team has spent on making it work and it is still barely usable.  

The last firmware update… (2.38.06 I believe) was released a very long time ago.  It was what typically would be considered a beta release although it was the 5th or 6th release that Sansa actually did. 

For a device that was marketed to support a capacity of 48 GB (16 + 32) it is an abysmal failure and is clearly being ignored by Sansa.  I have tagged the heck out of my collection to make it minimally usuable by stuffing anything even remotely similar under the same genre and many other tricks.  The handling of the touchscreen still remains so sensitive that it is all but impossible to navigate artists, albums or songs.  Prior releases of the firmware actually were impossible.  You could not get through “songs” to genres without timing out.

I’ve made some great purchases in my life and I’ve made some really bad purchases.   But my purchase of the near completely nonfunctional and essentially abandoned Sansa Fuze+ is the worst by far and well beyond any rational expectation of how poorly a product could actually be.

Is there any hope for this device?  The Rockbox impementation is all but unusable as well.  I know it will get there, but come on now, this platform is not even going to be sold by the end of the year.  You can tell that by the way that Sansa is utterly ignoring it.

Any advice from anybody on what to do with it?

2

All you’ll probably get is a snotty reply around here telling you to ■■■■ it up and quit bitching

if you don’t like it “move on” etc etc

I hear ya and i have some of the same complaints but…

I think they fall on deaf ears

So no sadly I wouldn’t hold out much hope

(for a couple more firmware updates to iron out bugs etc)

edit:

I think they are busy moving into the Shareware app market lol

Sansa File recovery software for example i seen show up on a warez site :wink:

3

There’s always Rockbox. Pamaury has been working his butt off trying to port it to the Fuze+. It still has a number of bugs, but at least you can navigate this thing. The touch pad is much more responsive, and the player in general lags less.

Be warned: Rockbox only has a limited amout of power management for the Fuze+, so you can expect to have to charge your battery more often. At least now you can charge directly through Rockbox, instead of having to reboot into the Sandisk firmware.

4

Hey, I feel your pain.  I like the Fuze+ for many of its features, and would love to see it refined.

The touchpad “lock” function, hobbled by the logic used to interpret touch input (in use, any touch that spanned from the top half to the lower would unlock the device) was replaced with the top button update.  Now, if only the touchpad sensitivity would be corrected, we’d have a machine that’s far easier to live with.

Given the chance, I’ll gladly shake the pom poms in hope of bringing attention to it.  As it is, living with the touchpad can be compared to:

  • Holding a freshly painted model, waiting for it to dry,
  • Waving a pocket AM radio while camping, hoping to get the best signal,
  • Making a sand painting in a small dish, trying to keep the lines from blending
  • Running home with the Etch-a-Sketch to show Dad a picture, trying not to fall and erase the image
  • Waving a Geiger counter looking for trace hot atomic particles following armageddon
  • Eating maple syrup on white bread as a boy (Canadian Mum!), trying to keep drips from the carpet
  • Lastly, a handy visual aid.  Remember these?

I remember the hand held version of these, with little steel balls.  Little did I know that those skills would prove so valuable 40 years later. 

Before locking the pad, I feel a sense of accomplishment once I find that desired track.  I really do understand.

The pad isn’t a generic piece, it’s a genuine Synaptics device, arguably the finest quality…if only it could be calibrated in firmware, the Fuze+ would be great. The Synaptics pads on my HP computers work flawlessly, don’t get me started on the crappy pads on the Panasonic Toughbooks I have to work with.  (Very expensive metal laptops hobbled by a horrible touchpad).

For everything else, the Fuze+ is a real joy.  Video just works, no matter what I throw at the machine.  Audiobooks have a real time-compressed variable speed playback that doesn’t sound like a chipmunk.  Folder browsing lets you happily navigate all over the device.  Video navigation lets you sweep through media like a champion.  I can plop microSD cards from the camera directly into the Fuze’s slot, and browse through photo folders like a charm, with the device automatically formatting the images for the screen.

Overall, I really like the machine, it just really needs a proper firmware revision for that touchpad.

As for the kludgy performance with a large music database, some proper coding would work wonders.  The solution could even be applied to the Clip+ / Clip ZIp, even though the platform is different, as large capacity microSD cards are becoming quite commonplace.  While building the database, the device appends the database file.  There has to be a better mousetrap out there, and I’m confident that there is.

The Fuze+ is running on a unique Freescale processor based platform, compared against the Austria Microsystems processor used in virtually every other Sansa. Its uniqueness adds to the difficulty, as most everything is different.  Updating this machine’s code would make a wonderful device.

Bob :stuck_out_tongue:



5

I can’t speak to how the Fuze+ behves at full capacity with a card. I have less than 1000 tracks on mine, and I use it on “shuffle all” mode only, occasionally with the sleep timer engaged. It really seems to sound just as good as my Zips.  So if you could graft Clip+ controls, proportionately sized, onto the Fuze+ instead of the wretched touchpad, you’d really have something.

6

@marvin_martian wrote:

I can’t speak to how the Fuze+ behves at full capacity with a card. I have less than 1000 tracks on mine, and I use it on “shuffle all” mode only, occasionally with the sleep timer engaged. It really seems to sound just as good as my Zips.  So if you could graft Clip+ controls, proportionately sized, onto the Fuze+ instead of the wretched touchpad, you’d really have something.

I agree the sound quality is excellent.  Maybe with 10 000 songs, the Fuze+ is a terrible MP3 player to use.  But with much smaller amounts of music, the main thing that is holding back the Fuze+ is the touchpad.  If SanDisk releases a replacement for the Fuze+ in late August with mechanical controls, they might have a winner.