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Comment by turtlebits | Hacker News Reader

Why can't somebody take simple smartphone hardware and make a modern media player that is not a phone?

Because you can do that with any phone and just not use the phone part?

Because I want something half the size of a phone. I don't need a giant screen, I just want a player that can do music or audiobooks and be light enough to run with.

I find myself researching, trying to find the smallest lightest old phone that either has decent internal memory or a micro SD slot, but it's not easy. Most phones are massive compared to an iPod shuffle

you could use a smart watch, not nearly as much storage but for playing music while running it can work well enough.

There's a case [1] for the Apple Watch that turns it into an 'iPod'. It's also quite similar to the Pod Case concept [2].

[1] https://thetinypod.com

[2] https://www.behance.net/gallery/72386255/Pod-Case-for-Apple-...

Oh that is kinda cool. Now I really want one

There are a ton of these and they're all behind your "company I've never heard of" blind spot.

Here's a one in close to the form factor of the last iPod Shuffle: https://www.fiio.com/m5

They have an AI assistant on the webpage and it says that the shortcut to activate it is cmd+Q (on Mac this is a global shortcut to quit an application, akin to alt+F4) which is absolutely psychotic. I wonder if in chinese macOS the shortcut is different or something or the person designing it uses windows and just thought ctrl+q(uestion) makes perfect sense

Maybe a pair of these: https://uk.shokz.com/products/openswim-pro

They have 32GB of storage, no screen, light enough to run and swim with.

The old HTC One M8 used to fill this niche but they might be too old to use on the daily any more. I’ve been thinking of digging mine out, the headphone output was great

Now there's a name I've not heard in a long time!

Yes the old box of obsolete smartphones and PDAs and datalogic falcon x3 pocket pcs waiting for me to do projects with them are why I can never justify buying even a20 dollar mp3 player.

the unihertz jelly is pretty small and not very expensive

You seem to be moving goal posts a little.

Get an iPhone 12 Mini or 13 Mini for around $200 used.

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