The modern smartphone is easily the genie in the bottle.
It's a phone, sure, but when you whip it out of your pocket you can take pictures, shoot movies, listen to music and surf the web, e-mail people and doom scroll on social media.
All things that not too long ago required more than one gadget on hand. It was a simpler time, and a more heavy one (because of everything you carried around). But it was also purposeful and deliberate.
If you were going for a night out with your friends, bring the phone and camera, leave the mp3-player and Gameboy at home. For a long trip, bring everything! Going to work? Phone and mp3 player will suffice.
Did I say simpler? Maybe I meant more cumbersome? This isn't necessarily bad per se.
Doing something with intent, choosing what gear to bring, is satisfying in and of itself. Or a let down, and you adjust when you encounter the same situation again.
Besides purpose, deliberation and intent I also just plain enjoyed it more. Sure, the first years of the smartphone revolution felt like magical times. They got better, faster, stronger, all the time and could quite literally replace a desktop computer today.
But we lost some of the fun and quirkiness along the way. Every smartphone today looks pretty much identical. And with a duopoly of operating systems that do the same things, sure it's an impressive array of things, but we are left with no diversity. No quirkiness.
I, for one, decided to do something about it. My first step was to buy a modern mp3 player or DAP (for Digital Audio Player) as they're known today. I bought a mid-segment Fiio M21, figuring appx. $350 should get me a pretty good player.
I was right, the Fiio M21 is an Android based DAP, it has WiFi and Bluetooth should you want it, it has a touch screen and while the version of Android on it (13) isn't exactly this years model it's also not ancient. It (and every other DAP I've seen) lacks a camera and a SIM tray though. Thank god.
I pretty much followed SuperReviews guide to setting up an Android DAP when getting started.
So, lessons learned?
Let's get this out of the way first, how does it sound? It sounds fine. I can't hear any real difference from just listening on my phone but that wasn't my main point. I wanted distraction-free listening, no notifications, no apps to suck me in.
And it delivers on that front. I now do my commute to and from work free from staring at a screen.
It's still early Days though. will I stick to it?
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