I have a friend who’s legs are paralyzed and she’s in a nursing home. She’s only in her 40s and mentally sharper than I am. I got her a 4GB Fuze for Xmas ($70 at CC) plus a 4GB flash card ($15 at Staples) and one Fuze for me. The idea is, she can send me the flash card and a list of songs (and maybe movies) that she wants. Then I burn them to the card and send it back. I really don’t need an mp3 player (I use my phone) but I need to make sure everything is working before I send the card to her. Both Fuzes tend to freeze up when updating the card. She can also listen to FM make FM recordings, of course. I ordered a cheap USB AC adpter off ebay and had it sent to her. I hope it has enough juice. It should arrive a day or two after Xmas.
Anyway, here are my impressions. Both players exhibited odd behavior after firmware updates. One had the white screen of death and the other lost all info on the the internal memory, but reinstalling the firmware fixed that. It also wanted to use the flash card rather than internal memory in SMC. FM auto-scanning picked up very weak stations (and even non-stations) until I did a “reset factory settings”. Both players could no longer view the sample pictures. Both players exhibit intermittent clicking in the right ear on FM recordings, both with the old firmware and the new (yes, this is well known and is do to overtaxing the system while recording weaker stations). But everything is working fine now (the FM click is tolerable)
So here is my advice:
*Before you do a firmware update, remove the flash card.
*Do a reformat after the update.
*Reload factory settings.
I noticed that you can add jpegs to the flash card without using SMC. I converted a copy of Wall-e (took an hr) and it plays very nice, except it is still in the original wide-screen format and not reduced in size much from the original 500MBs. I need to find some software that will let me vertically stretch and horizontally crop videos (I use VLC to do this while watching movies on my 4:3 monitor) as well as reducing the file size. If you could get videos to run full-screen, it might be feasible to watch movies on such a small screen. And is there any way to avoid using SMC?
I’ll be heading up to see her on Xmas day to give her her presents (also got a sweat outfit and chocolates).
Message Edited by raderator on 12-24-2008 03:54 PM
Message Edited by raderator on 12-24-2008 04:08 PM
Message Edited by raderator on 12-24-2008 04:09 PM
Message Edited by raderator on 12-24-2008 04:29 PM
