What about a Pine digital audio player?

[ClairelyClaire]

Since the chips are so cheap, this might have more potential if it were slightly less dumb.  Add a microphone (Already common on dumb players for voice recording), and WiFi(Basically free on modern chips), and you have a walkie-talkie.

You also have a remote control, since you have Bluetooth, and a clock/timer, and a pager, possibly a private offline voice assistant (Since on-chip AI is a thing now),  possibly a game console(A capsense analog touchpad area is basically free, or you could use an accelerometer and do tilt based games), etc.

You could also have it connect *to* a phone and show notifications and stuff, to let you leave your phone in a backpack more often.


I do think a color screen would be worth it though.

This is an interesting idea, but is more of a PDA (or iPod Touch) than a dedicated audio player. I'm specifically interested in a quality audio player that doesn't have unnecessary bells and whistles. Adding voice recording makes sense, but I wouldn't want wifi - it's just another exploitable attack vector on a network, and goes back to the whole "can it track me" thing. The more features you add to the OS, the more it affects battery life, and the more resources are used on non-audio stuff.

There's really nothing left in the audio player market - there's one Chinese brand high-end player that uses subpar firmware, and all of Sony's high-end devices run Android now, which isn't an option for me. There are reputable brands selling less expensive players, but it seems like nobody cares about firmware anymore. Example - There's a company called Oakcastle which sells a mini clip audio player on Amazon, but the firmware is no different from other similar players. SanDisk's firmware on any of its full-color display players sucks and is horribly slow and laggy. My first gen Sansa Clip's OLED finally bit the dust last year, hence my search for alternatives.

I've been using a Chinese brand clip audio player that's decent enough (long battery life, buttons work well) but lacks some pretty key features, all of which could be addressed with better firmware. Bluetooth has to be manually enabled every time the player turns off or goes to sleep. The onboard Bluetooth audio profile doesn't support whatever extended features my car's audio system expects. It uses FAT32, which means files are displayed in the order they're added to the filesystem, not in alphabetical order - and most FAT sorter apps are flaky in Windows 10.

The firmware is really key, which is why I think the Pine team might be a great fit for developing a player with non-sucky firmware.