I own one of these. Using it is the physical manifestation of delayed gratification and I love it.
- Getting new music or Podcasts requires plugging it in to a real computer, transferring files, and updating the media library. It takes a while.
- Without a touchscreen you can't "scrub" through files and must fast-forward with the buttons. Fast-forwarding to your place in a 90-minute podcast takes a while.
- If you plug it in while in the middle of a podcast, or reboot it, it will lose your place many times. It has a setting to not do this but it is unreliable.
- Due to the above two points I really got in the habit of ensuring I had enough time to listen to a full show in one shot, and that made me subscribe to less podcasts. This is a plus.
- You cannot view show notes for a podcast or click on links in those notes. You must sit down at a PC to do this.
- This device helped me to not take my phone with me everywhere. That's a plus.
- It doesn't "fast charge" or anything. The battery indicator is imprecise so sometimes it will shut off while you're using it. The battery lasts forever so that's OK.
You have to want to use something like this. It is better for you brain than a smartphone. I encourage everyone to try it. It is high quality, built well, and inexpensive, so very much worth a shot. If you want a bluetooth and USB-C version, the Fiio M5 is also good.
I'm not in sales. I'm a devops/sysadmin person. And I didn't mean to do a sales pitch, sorry.
The downsides all wind up being worth it to me because I'm starting from the premise of "I want my smartphone as far away from me as often as possible". It allows me to decouple the primary reason I'd carry my smartphone, and carry something less unwanted instead. I'm guessing you can figure out the reasons; feeds, notifications, alerts, an operating system built for annoyance/addiction that is not Free Software, etc.
Really, though, I encourage you to try it out. Think about how much more time you had to think while walking your dog or something 20 years ago.
> Think about how much more time you had to think while walking your dog or something 20 years ago.
This is an excellent point. I recently mused about how all my ideas for writing articles come in the shower, and your comment made me realize it's because I have nothing to distract me.
I'll try removing distractions/being bored more often, thanks!
I use an old iPod classic with a flash memory upgrade for offline audio listening and was considering this device because of perceived audio quality. From your description it sounds like this device is in the class of alibaba junk. It sounds like the software was an afterthought, fair enough. How does the audio quality compare to things like an iPhone/iPod etc?
The sound quality (via Sony MDR-7506) is comparable to an iPod. Detailed and clear. It can get very loud and drive much nicer headphones than mine. It loads and plays FLACs and other large files much faster than the iPod can because the iPod is 20 years old and doesn't have the horsepower.
The software, honestly, is not nearly as bad as "alibaba junk". It is just fine. The iPod's software is more thought-out and consistent. The Fiio software is much more user friendly than Rockbox though. It responds well and hardly ever crashes. It has all the settings you'd expect and then some. It will be annoying if you expect perfection, but it never skips tracks on its own, the buttons always do what you want, settings aren't reset on you. The M5 is more fiddly than the M3K but I usually use the M5 anyway. I'm willing to tolerate the less-than-perfect software.
- Getting new music or Podcasts requires plugging it in to a real computer, transferring files, and updating the media library. It takes a while.
- Without a touchscreen you can't "scrub" through files and must fast-forward with the buttons. Fast-forwarding to your place in a 90-minute podcast takes a while.
- If you plug it in while in the middle of a podcast, or reboot it, it will lose your place many times. It has a setting to not do this but it is unreliable.
- Due to the above two points I really got in the habit of ensuring I had enough time to listen to a full show in one shot, and that made me subscribe to less podcasts. This is a plus.
- You cannot view show notes for a podcast or click on links in those notes. You must sit down at a PC to do this.
- This device helped me to not take my phone with me everywhere. That's a plus.
- It doesn't "fast charge" or anything. The battery indicator is imprecise so sometimes it will shut off while you're using it. The battery lasts forever so that's OK.
You have to want to use something like this. It is better for you brain than a smartphone. I encourage everyone to try it. It is high quality, built well, and inexpensive, so very much worth a shot. If you want a bluetooth and USB-C version, the Fiio M5 is also good.