One of the things I fancy the most is the ability to play music, photos, radio, audio books, and videos in a small and compact portable media player. It helps passing the time when you are in a waiting line, commuting or traveling. My first media player could only play MP3 audio and it was from a time when flash memory was small and worth its weight in gold. Battery life was also very short.

Nowadays we have so many choices, flash memory got more affordable, capacities are way larger, and battery life can last for over 24 hours of music play. The $80 Memorex I bought 2 years ago could only play MP3 music, came with 1GB memory and a SD flash card slot for up to 2GB total space. It would decide in what order the tracks would be played on it's own, ignoring my play lists completely. After 6 months of mild use, it simply stopped working and that was it. The sales person from Target (where I bought it) said that this happens a lot with Memorex and Phillips players.

I also used to have fun with my Sony MiniDisk player, which I admit is more cute than useful. Each Sony MiniDisk is rather inexpensive and can hold 700Mb of music that can be re-written over and over using optic-magnetic recording, which is still one of the most reliable in existence. It *could* have become the most popular player in the world, have Sony not decided to lock it down to an isolated device that is incompatible with nearly everything, and you cannot just use it as a sophisticated external USB storage device.

It can be used as a fancy portable sound recorder, but whatever you record can never be copied outside of the device (because Sony doesn't want you to). So consider the fancy optic fiber cable connector practically useless. You can say that Sony buried their own MiniDisk player into obscurity because they want to protect their music sales department (Sony owns Columbia Records). Sony MiniDisk is probably only used in Japan nowadays. Sony's outstanding digital tape (DAT) players had the same end, and were also confined to Japan-only nowadays (for the ones who still bother to use the equally locked down DAT device).

  This week I've received this very cute little Sansa Fuze portable media player as a Christmas present from my wife. As opposed to the locked down Apple iPods and Sony players, the Sansa Fuze is 100% unlocked and shows as a plain external USB drive when plugged into my computer. I can simply drag and drop music, audio books, videos and pictures straight into it. As a matter of fact, it is so simple to use that it comes with no manual, drivers or installation CD. You just plug it into a USB port and and drop files into it.

The Sansa Fuze comes with 4Gb and a microSD expansion slot, which I already occupied with an extra 4Gb flash card, so it's 8Gb now. Not bad for only $79 considering how much a 4Gb iPod costs. The controls are identical to the iPod Nano, with the spinning mechanical dial with a button in the center. The dial has 4 buttons to make it very intuitive to use and control the graphical menu. The color screen is quite bright and easy on the eyes. I had no trouble watching full length videos on it. It's a nice feature that the Fuze bookmarks where you were in the videos, even if you quit one and go watch another one. It remembers where you were in all of them when you come back later on.

Surprisingly for such a small player, the Fuze comes with FM radio with 20 presets, voice recording with built-in mic, and you can also record FM radio. It features an audio equalizer with presets for the most common kinds of music, and the usual "Audible" audio book player, podcasts, and JPEG picture viewer included in most players out there.

I was also surprised by the rubberized metal back that makes it feel sturdy and well built. The small Fuze size fits well on your palm and pocket, but not too small like the iPods that always feel like they will fall off and break. Considering I already had an older Microsoft 30Gb Zune, I am pretty satisfied with the little Sansa Fuze. The Microsoft software locks the Zune so that it cannot be seen as a USB drive when plugged, and *nothing* can be loaded into it if not through it's VERY annoying/confusing Microsoft software - which currently refuses to run in my computer. Since the software won't run (it closes immediately after running), I cannot use the glorious 30Gb Zune at all. I already tried uninstalling, cleaning up the Windows registry, reinstalling, rebooting, upgrading, and the heck, but the Zune software simply won't run in my computer anymore - period.

So I guess I just added the Zune to my ever-growing list of locked-up media players that became unusable because of their very own "protected" nature. And note that the "protected" part of the deal is to avoid having the user loading music into it too easily – or at all. After some research, I found out that Microsoft went to great extends to lock down the Zune, up to the point of building layers of encrypted security into the internal hardware to make sure you will NOT put music into the Zune too easily - or at all. Hats off for Microsoft – they won again. My Zune is 100% locked down and I can't use it at all!

So to what concerns me, this growing pile of locked-down media players such as the Sony MiniDisc, Sony DAT, Microsoft Zune and the Apple iPods can all go f*%& themselves because now I have a Sansa Fuze player that happily loads and plays whatever I drag and drop into it without even installing drivers or reading manuals.

Unfortunately, the future doesn't look as bright because Sansa's flagship "View" media player now comes locked down so that you can only copy videos into it by using their crappy slow motion software. No more drag and drop because it's too easy or too convenient - and we don't want that, right? On a recent review I found out that Sansa has also locked down uploaded contents into the View Player, so that you cannot drag and drop them back to your computer. Hurray!! Lock-down galore!!

I better hide my Sansa Fuze well before somebody finds out I am having too much fun and locks it down as well... O_o;;