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- HOTNESS UNHOT
Amazon has the SanDisk Sansa Clip+ 4GB MP3 Player, Black (SDMX18R-004GK-A57) for $24.99 with free shipping on $25+. $2 Amaon MP3 credit included with purchase. Features 1" OLED, microSDHC, microSD support, FM radio tuner, 40 presets, voice recorder, and belt clip. Best Buy has it for the same price.
$25
these things are about as lame as buying a tape player these days. Smartphones are about all you need.
Richard Lamer, The Richmeister, The Copy Room Guy Saturday Night Live has a couple of these...
http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/copy-machine/135
http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/copy-machine-ii/1353778
I wish it were true but this is not always the case. It's great how much a smartphone can do, but a lot of the things they do, they do inferior to a purpose built device like an MP3 player.
Smartphones don't have an intuitive interface you can operate using tactile buttons, you have to be looking at the screen for most operations. They're much larger to handle, more costly if broken, and that puts a lot of wear on the headphone jack, not just in total sessions of use but also more with a smartphone because with their larger physical size the headphone plug is sticking out further into your pocket where there's more stress against it.
If your smartphone costs a few hundred dollars (one way or the other through a service contract) it can make sense to offload a significant amount of wear on it with a much less expensive device that takes its place for that use.
My Clip running Rockbox can achieve enough volume to run *most* of my cans, while my phone has a lovely hearing protection circuit meant to limit sound levels for crappy low-z cans or buds but that limits volume too much for quality higher-z cans or buds. I suppose you can hack the firmware on a phone or use a 3rd party app but with some MP3 players that firmware is ready to roll (flash) and free.
Using a second device is equivalent to having a backup battery to the extent that your phone may run twice as long between charges if not serving double duty.
You can leave it in plain sight for vehicle playback or elsewhere without much worry about someone stealing a $25 MP3 player, it's not a big loss.
Often the sound quality on an MP3 player is higher, and there's less bulk to get in your way when exercising. Who wants to wear a smartphone strapped to their waist or arm while exercising?
Can you run Windows 8 on it?
For the price, they can't be beat. Good sound quality. Load Rockbox on there for better format capabilities and it's good times.
My music player of choice when I'm at the gym is an old Rockboxed Sansa E260. No way am I going to risk damaging a smartphone.
This is one of the few music players that plays FLAC files, sound quality is better than an iPod that costs 10x as much.
Got one for wifey two years ago. She loves it still.
My Sansa has outlived an iPod touch and an iPod Nano at my house.
A 1" screen? That makes it rather bigger than I prefer. Why is it so difficult to get a *small* MP3 player? I had a Zen Nano Plus 7 years ago. It was the size of a box of matches, durable enough to survive countless falls onto asphalt, and it still had a small screen that was adequate to see what was playing and select tracks. And, like the Sansa, it had a clip for attaching to my CamelBack. Unfortunately, it didn't survive being run over.