Well. A watched pot never boils and a watched window never yields a UPS truck. I looked out the window today and saw the Brown Mercedes of Doom parked out there and watched to see if the driver would emerge with my package, only to see two drivers emerge. Trainee. Yeck. No wonder it didn't get here until 2pm.
The Fuse arrived from the online merchant in a box large enough to bury a small cat in. In the typical fashion of online merchants who do a lot of courier shipping, they stuck the Fuse's blister packaging inside a box that was 3x too big for it, and filled up the remaining space with that styrofoam popcorn we all know and love so much. To be honest, when he handed me the package, I thought it was empty.
I ran back to the computer and finished what I was doing and exited back to the desktop and took my handy dandy letter opener to the multi-layer packing tape sarcophagus that entombed my new mp3 player. Somebody at the Future Shop distribution center was either bored, or has an intensely sick sense of humour in that regard.
The unit was even smaller than I expected it to be, measuring just 3.5" in length, about 1.5" wide, and barely more than half an inch thick. This is one miniscule mp3 player, and that's exactly why I bought it - or at least one of the two main reasons.
I'd already loaded the Rio Music Manager software onto my desktop machine last night, so really all I had to do was plug it in and go. Surprise #1 was that even though the unit resembles a USB thumb drive (and Future Shop even calls it one) the USB removable storage drivers do NOT load, and the Fuse does NOT show up as a disk drive. No biggy. I bought it to be a music player. I just thought being able to schlep files around would be a bonus.
The headphones - the Sennheiser MX300 earbuds - as expected - were crap. Well. Maybe they'd be better if they were all you had, but I still have the Sonys I bought last year. I did a quick A/B test of the two and it didn't even take five seconds to figure out that the MX300's were being thrown into the "junk drawer" of my desk for future salvage some day in a crisis.
As a thoughtful touch, the Fuse came preloaded with a selection of music so you could listen to it right away without having to mess with the computer interface. Unfortunately my taste in tunes conflict vastly with the taste of the marketing people. The Fuse was emptied very quickly.
What can I say about the user interface. Here goes. I fancy that a year or so ago when this product was being conceived and in early development that a group of product engineers gathered around a table and said "Let us take a pointing mechanism that people have despised on laptops for the past ten years, and implement it in an mp3 player in a way that people will love", and they did. Thankfully IBM and Toshiba have gotten their head out of their collective butts and have started to use touchpads. But I tell you... the little trackpoint style device on the Fuse is implemented beautifully and I might say - I like it even better than the "wheel" on the iPod. In play mode "up" is play/pause, left is back, right is forward and down is stop. Couldn't get any easier than that. In the menu/options mode it works just like a regular mouse in a sense.
Transferring files to the Fuse was a bit of a nuisance at first. The only two players they say they support are their own, and Real. Both of which I hate. The Fuse includes an Apple branded iTunes CD for Mac users that includes a driver to make iTunes work with the Fuse, but nothing for iTunes for Windows. This brought me great displeasure at first. Don't get me wrong. The Rio Music Manager software isn't that bad. If I had to use it, I would. But I've just gotten so addicted to the Smart Playlists in iTunes that I wasn't prepared to give them up. Especially when I spent an hour this morning rating tracks to make the Smart Playlist function more useful.
So I loaded up the Fuse with a few songs I was familiar with and was instantly gratified. The fidelity easily matched or exceeded the Samsung Yepp CD-based mp3 player I was using before, and the volume output easily exceeded it. This thing can snort for the size of it, and considering it powers off one AAA battery. Actually, now that I think of it... the quality is better. The Fuse playing mp3's sounds like the Yepp playing a regular CD. A lot of those first and second generation mp3 CD players had funky mp3 decoders that used to flutter and pop a lot. I haven't heard this Fuse burp once. And trust me... my ears would hear it. I am very picky... right, Matt? On this front, I will yield to Apple. The iPod has a better headphone amp. The sound is fuller. But it also runs on what... TWICE the power supply? For the size of this thing, I am VERY pleased.
It's kind of a funny-shaped device I will admit, and maybe even a bit too small. It's almost slipped out of my hand twice. Thankfully the cable on the Sony headphones makes an excellent bungee cord. When I first started listening to it for an extended period I held it in my hand a few different ways and tried to figure out what the design team was thinking. They were obviously thinking something but it took a few seconds to decipher. If you put it face up in your right hand, your thumb fits nicely around the end of it (where the volume control is) and it can slide around to the top to operate the stick.
I was thrilled when I found out that this thing has a backlight too. After using it for a few seconds I thought it was a shame there was no way to put a timer on the backlight or adjust the contrast of the screen. Ten minutes later I found both of those things in the setup menu. They didn't miss much.
It also has an integrated stopwatch, and appears to sync the date and time from the computer when you download music for it's internal clock.
Now back to transferring files. I found a trick. Anybody who has or will ever use a Fuse and uses iTunes for Windows will love me. It is possible, but it's a little sneaky. Fortunately the drag-and-drop between iTunes and the Rio Music Manager is decent. Make your smart playlist in iTunes as you normally would. Then select all the songs in the playlist. Drag them down to the taskbar to the Rio Music Manager button and hold it there until it task switches to it. Then move the mouse to the Fuse icon and let go of the mouse. Blammo. Your iTunes playlist will upload to the Fuse. It's a little ugly, but... it's a sacrifice I will make to avoid using the clumsy playlist manager in RMM. Maybe some day some nice person will make an iTunes for Windows driver for the Fuse.
So the final verdict is this. Sorry I don't have cute graphics like bunny boy.
Audio Fidelity 4/5
Fuse Interface 5/5
File Transfer Interface 3/5
Overall 4/5
