What’s better about a small dedicated player compared to using an offline media jukebox app?
Smartphones can play offline media. They can play media hosted on a private server. Nobody’s forcing any smartphone user to use Spotify in particular. There’s always alternatives like VLC and countless others that offer that same functionality.
To me, a dedicated player is redundant hardware with less processing power and refinement than a typical smartphone.
Even Apple, king of the locked down proprietary experience, has a Music app with the option to completely disable and hide their streaming service from even being visible. You can sync music via a USB cable or WiFi from local files just like it was an original iPod.
Well first of all I hate touchscreens and wish they would die in a fire. Every smartphone I've had has been too big for me to comfortably use with one hand, compared to older dumbphones which were very easy to use. Even if you find a small smartphone, the touchscreen then gets cramped. A small digital screen and thoughtfully placed physical buttons creates an interface that I can navigate without ever taking it out of my pocket. It also takes up less space, which opens up new possibilities for places to put it or when/where to take it. When you have a small device with physical buttons, you can just do more with it, easier, faster, more reliably.
The other thing is, most smartphones today are insanely over-complicated and not reliable at all. They consume an insane amount of system resources, their battery life is piss-poor, they're constantly being updated which leads to more instability. And new devices aren't necessarily backwards compatible with old apps, meaning you might end up with a phone just for music anyway, or end up losing a useful app. A dedicated device with a simpler RTOS can actually function faster, better, more reliably, for longer.
And to top it all off, the software of a Sony Walkman is usually top-notch. Good EQ presets, an interface designed to make it easy to navigate, with all the player options you want, with UX front and center. Quality control is high because you have to assume the user will never update the firmware.
And having a bunch of MP3s by default is just the simplest thing you can do. Usually the software auto-indexes and sorts and creates playlists etc by the ID3 tags, but if not, you can organize them manually into folders and manual playlists. You have pretty much total control over the music selection, experience, quality.
> What’s better about a small dedicated player compared to using an offline media jukebox app?
Sometimes offline requires more effort. I would rather my kid have a dedicated MP3 player that does just that instead of a phone that requires locking down with too many points of breach. Way more cheaper to replace too compared to a lost/damaged smartphone.
Smartphones can play offline media. They can play media hosted on a private server. Nobody’s forcing any smartphone user to use Spotify in particular. There’s always alternatives like VLC and countless others that offer that same functionality.
To me, a dedicated player is redundant hardware with less processing power and refinement than a typical smartphone.
Even Apple, king of the locked down proprietary experience, has a Music app with the option to completely disable and hide their streaming service from even being visible. You can sync music via a USB cable or WiFi from local files just like it was an original iPod.