P**T
My refurbished one was toooooo buggy. Should I try another? Hmmmm.
First note: I ordered a refurbished 4GB model from Dealville and fulfilled by Amazon. No problems with either one of them. The problems I had may have been from a bad / incomplete refurbishing. Not sure. As it was refurbished by Sandisk it shouldn't matter. OK...read on. Sorry for the length btw. Just trying to be descriptive.I've been a fan of Sandisk products for a few years now. Love their flash drives, memory cards, etc. Very good quality at a reasonable price. Their customer support has also been very good when I've needed it. (Except for when I've gotten someone on the phone with a heavy accent and couldn't understand 'em too well. Hehe.) I also happen to own a 4GB Sansa Clip Plus which is the best little MP3 player on the market IMHO. Love the thing to death! Had it since 2011 and it's still kicking. I did start thinking recently that I wanted a model with video capabilities though. (Nice for power outages when you want to watch a movie, ya know?) I'd heard a lot of bad reviews about the Fuze Plus so I wasn't really thinking about buying one, buuuut... I looked around and couldn't really find anything else with attractive features within a decent price range. I decided to go for it and try one out. Here's my experience...My player arrived packaged in a small, but pretty sturdy cardboard box within an Amazon box. It came with the stock headphones and the proper USB cable. There were no instructions so I downloaded the pdf file from Sandisk. I plugged in the device and saw the battery was dead so I charged it for a few hours with a USB wall adapter until full. Took about 4 to 5 hours. I plugged it into the computer (HP with Windows 7) and it was recognized and installed properly. I downloaded the Sansa firmware installer and updated the firmware with that before I tried to use it. No problems or complaints so far. I played with the so called "terrible interface" with the touch pad and figured most of it out pretty fast. Honestly, after updating the firmware I didn't find it to be that bad. Just had to get used to it's sensitivity. Didn't like it as much as the Clip Plus's buttons but it was ok. The sound was good (used the Jazz setting like on the +) as I listened to the mp3's that were already on the player. Next I decided to try the video aspect of it. Resized some videos to the proper specs and they played fine. (Milla Jovovitch still looks really cute on a tiny 2.4 inch TFT screen and zombies look fairly good too.) It had a bright and clear picture. Everything seemed fine. I was thinking I'd found my next semi-favorite player.And then...the tide turned. Woosh.It was time to copy my music library onto a new 32GB Transcend class 10 card and insert it. I duplicated the contents of the music card I have in my Sansa Clip Plus. I had personally tagged, re-tagged, translated, shortened filenames, corrected embedded art, and volume analysed my whole library with MP3 Tag and Media Monkey to work with the Clip Plus. I got pretty anal with it and they work great with that device and others. (Most of my MP3's are 320kbps w/ CBR and a few 192's btw.) Didn't agree with the Fuze Plus though. I inserted the card and tried to boot it up. The player froze up on the boot screen. Just the Sandisk image displayed and didn't disappear. I powered the device down and turned it back on and the same thing happened. I removed the card and re-inserted after powering down. This time I got the loading card thingy. Took forever to load but it finally did. My music library seemed to show up and played ok even though half of the album art wouldn't display. The startup problems persisted though. Every time I'd turn it off and then power it back up it seemed to be a crap shoot whether it would successfully work or not. I also noticed when the card was loaded that if I tried to play a video on the onboard memory the video would freeze up as well as the player. I was beginning to think it was the card and not the Sansa. Maybe it didn't like the Transcend card? Maybe it was the fact it was a class 10? Maybe the card was defective? Nope on all counts. I tried the new card in my Clip Plus and it worked fine. My computer liked it too. I also tried the other Sandisk cards I have and the Fuze Plus did all the same things. I tried a 32GB Sandisk class 4 and two Sandisk 16GB cards--one a class 4 and one a class 2. All good and genuine cards. Could it be the tags? Nope. One of the cards was blank. Same problems when inserted multiple times. Could the card slot be defective? Ummmm...maybe partly. I tried to boot it up a few times without the cards and now it was doing the same thing that it did WITH the cards. Wow this sucker was BUGGY! I'd read on the Sandisk forums that you could do a manual re-installation of the firmware. Supposedly this could fix some problems. Tried it and it didn't. Gave up all efforts at this point.Like I said at the top, it might of just been a badly refurbished one. I sent this one back and got a refund. I may take a chance and try another one-- either new or refurbished. Or I may just wait for Sandisk's next model. I really think they need to start road testing their products a bit better in the future, refurbished or otherwise. Hate for them to go downhill. Uggggggg. You guys can do better.
G**.
great product
I will often buy a "refurbished" product because I know it has been fixed, repaired, or at least confirmed in good working condition. The Sansa Fuze+ arrived, as expected based on other reviews, in a plain box with no manuals, instructions and a dead battery. I fully charged the unit using my cell phone charger, took about 2 hours. Using a USB port on a computer probably would have taken 4-5 hours. I visited the SanDisk website and downloaded the quick setup guide and user manual. Also downloaded the Sansa Updater software. Once the unit was fully charged, I plugged it into a usb port on my computer and completed the firmware update as suggested. I did have one problem when setting it up. Had to restart the unit a couple of times to be certain the firmware update properly took, and the unit would not let me set the language to English. I think it was stuck on Danish or German, because once I landed on one of those languages, I could set the next step to my continent. Then, following the instructions in the User Guide, changed the language to English.Once set up, I had no problems uploading music files (I have files in flac or oob-vorbis formats). The player sorted the files, created my album list and mostly applied the album pictures. Also uploaded a couple of video clips and photos, just to test the unit.All works great and is easy to use once you learn the menu system, which does require a short learning curve.Pros: Great value for a refurbished unit. Looks like brand new, even to having the factory protection covering over the view screen. Works and sounds great, and menus have lots of options to tailor the unit to suit. Easily accepts additional memory and integrates any files into it's menu selections without any problems.Cons: If you plan to play anything other than low-quality MP3 files, buy extra memory. I purchased an 8-gig sdhc card, should have gotten a 16 gig or larger. The system starts slow with the extra memory. Be patient. Also, if you do not take time to read the manual and practice using the menus, you probably will not have a good experience with this unit. And, you MUST learn to use the lock and unlock function to prevent really strange things from happening every time you touch the unit. This is the main thing that kept me from giving it 5 stars.All-in-all, I think this is a super unit, I would certainly recommend taking advantage of the availability of this refurbished unit to save a big chunk of change for a good quality player.
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