Hacker News Reader

Comment by jayd16 | Hacker News Reader

These days you can get a cheap AOSP phone and run a lot more so I'm not that surprised this stuff is dying off.

None of those are small. And they are not that cheap either. I think this is an obvious market opportunity -- small, cheap, open devices doing one thing well. No need for massive screens, touch screens , just a couple of buttons, a battery, DAC, USB and headphone jack, SD slot. I am agnostic on bluetooth support, not a deal breaker for me without it, but if it did not add too much to the price, then sure.

I think that market opportunity is well covered, except for the "open" part. Gadget sites are overflowing with cheap and small music playing devices with those parts.

I disagree.

The F/OSS part is the most important. Rockbox allowed an incredible degree of customization. For something like a music/audiobook player personal tastes in interaction with the a small device mean that configurability is key. That, I suspect is why there are only larger devices with loads more buttons and touchscreens available.

The ability to set timeouts and restart from last position on power-on, led light-level, sort-order etc made devices supported by them something that I could use. I have tried various Alibaba sourced devices that were in the US$20-50 range and none of them had the right form-factor and customizability.

This what I did to replace my iRiver running Rockbox. One problem to watch out for with cheap phones is that the audio can be noisy, even if only when charging, which will be particularly annoying when listening to audio books or talks.

I found an Android app called MortPlayer which is very close to Rockbox in terms of functions and configurability. It hasn't been updated in a years, but still works well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com