I wrote last year about the Sansa Clip, a media player with a pretty decent built-in FM radio. I mentioned at the time that the Clip's "bigger brother," the Fuze, also has an FM radio in it.
I had first thought that the Fuze's radio was similar to the Clip's, and it is similar in many respects, but an additional year's worth of experience has shown me that the Fuze is just a little more sensitive than the Clip, and certainly easier to use. When I was in Paris last August, the Fuze's auto-preset function was picking up so many stations that it filled up all 40 available presets! (On my Tecsun PL-380, I counted 51 stations strong enough for the Tecsun's Easy Tuning Mode to pick up.)
At my Oakland residence, it's able to pick up some (but not all) the weak stations in the part of the FM band that, in the United States, is reserved for educational and noncommercial stations. That said, I should note that the station shown in this photo, KQED-FM, is a 110,000-watt powerhouse. I probably should have shown off a weaker station (though the Fuze doesn't have a signal strength indicator).
The asterisk in front of the frequency number indicates that the station has a preset assigned.
Recording capabilities are the same as the Clip, and the Fuze also supports FLAC and Ogg Vorbis formats. The Fuze has been superseded by a newer version, the Fuze+. I would like to find out if it offers better recording quality than the 24-bit sampling used by the Fuze and the Clip. The Sansa web site hasn't been too enlightening on that question.
I really like the Fuze as a media player. The FM reception and recording capabilities are a great bonus and, as I said about the Clip, Sansa didn't take the lazy way out by putting in a weak FM radio. The Fuze's radio is surprisingly sensitive and is free of self-generated noises and interference. Sansa put together a nice package of features. Let's hope they've done the same with the Fuze+.