It’s a Creative Zen Stone that I got as a Christmas gift in 2008. I just found it in a drawer, and it’s still holding charge. The last thing I put on it was The Life And Times Of Scrooge by Tuomas Holopainen, in 2015 – I don’t know why, at that time I definitely had a smartphone.
It has a headphone jack, which immediately makes it better than every smartphone produced in the last several years, and it can easily drive my 80-ohm Beyerdynamic. The audio quality is as good as one can expect. The only drawback is that it only holds 1GB… my old CD rips had to be compressed to hell and back.
Let me reiterate that this has been sitting untouched for a decade and was immediately ready for action. No login, no annoying software updates, expired subscription, or remote bricking by the manufacturer. Eat my shorts, Spotify Car Thing.
P.s. A Lifetime Of Adventure is a banger. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWwSVOo5K_k
Back in the day, I had one that looked like this and was essentially built around an AA battery, which was great since you could always carry a spare.
I used to have one of these to listen to music while walking to school back in the day. It was the first device I hacked the firmware to move the menu options around. It was the perfect size to fit into the breast pocket on school uniforms.
I loved this thing. Bought like three of them in a decade rather than join the iPod universe.
Weren’t those Cowon, or something like that?
Mine was a Samsung IIRC and I remember having to look a while for something with a swappable battery and FLAC support
Nice. Didn’t remember Samsung making some. Mine were Cowon or iRiver (which might actually also be Cowon).
I have this one.