I don't recall either model being that expensive though.
I can understand wanting to use an affordable tiny ipad nano like device instead of a smartphone. But I don't understand this, being 3 times more expensive than a decent entry level smartphone unless you want to use it with high quality over the ears noise cancelling headphones. The physical buttons do not even seem to be ergonomically placed.
Hell, for many people why would they even have wi-fi on?
Some people work in environments where you can't have "smart" devices. I could see this squeaking by (for example you can have some single purpose devices like Garmin watches, but not Apple watches with wifi and cellular).
It might be good for airplanes too if you want something to drive your headphones without draining your battery, but I guess in-seat power has kinda solved that already.
Me, but I aint paying $800 for it (if I understood the article correctly).
Give me a walkman made specifically for listening to music with 250GB+ and without all the pain to move music onto and off of the device and can last _weeks_ on a single charge with regular use and I would purchase the shit out of it.
I feel like a lot of people don't realize just how leashed they are with modern phones. My favorite phone ever is an old Palm phone that I still have to this day because I refuse to throw it away. It's smaller than the original SE, far lighter, and could last up to two weeks on a single charge. Contrast that with the 3rd gen SE I have now and I'd give it up in a heartbeat if something like that Palm arrived.
But it won't, so moving the music playing experience off of the phone is a good step to loosening that leash.
That's the pro model. The consumer version is half that.
> Anyway, back to this $800 model. Unlike regular phone equipment, this has a proper audio amplifier with big, beefy capacitors to power the analog audio output. That makes it much bigger than the A300, at 72.6×132 mm and a whopping 17 mm thick. It also has two audio outs: a standard 3.5 mm headphone jack and a 4.4 mm "balanced" audio jack, which is used by some high-end audio equipment.
It just feels weird to cheap out on storage, of all things, on an $800 device in 2023
I finally made the switch to a phone without headphone jack last year. I like the phone, but the pretty expensive bluetooth headphones I tried don't sound as great as my beaten year old wired ones.
There's many places where I don't care about having a dangling wire: at home watching tv/movies, while working at my desk, or in public libraries for instance.
A small audio player that work with my wired headphones would be workable, I l'm seriously thinking about it if moving music in and out is easy enough.
My criteria is heavy on "do one thing well". I want something without internet, "apps", a convoluted OS, and basically all the other things that make phones a Swiss army knife.
Those things aren't free, they come with a cost which I'm not willing to pay; attention, bugs, distraction-as-a-service. Also, I'm not 100% on this because I haven't tested it, but I think the output I get from FLAC files on my music device is better than my phone.
Yes, I'm also the type who enjoys a separate camera.
There's a piece of mind to dedicated devices I was robbed of for a while with the the phone.
Now having said all this, the real answer to your question is; nobody, because this device seems to be a phone :/
Well said, that's _exactly_ how I feel. I would 100% purchase a dedicated music device, but it can't be a glorified phone (I don't even like the smartscreen in the article) with a phones problems.
The terrible error here is including the Android home screen in the marketing materials.
By all means base it on Android, but I never want to see anything like that on a "stand alone" device. Eliminating any generic UI should have been a priority from the go because it completely changes the sentiment around the device.
It seems to not have a modem but it does have the play store and wi-fi, so...