Thread · HN Continuity

I recently bought an Android-based MP3 player that can use Spotify, including Spotify lossless, and has a microSD slot. The benefits here are pretty substantial. It has a really nice headphone amp inside of it for driving larger headphones at the right volume (and a switch in software for low/medium/high headphone gain, separate from volume). Also I don't have to take up expensive space inside my iPhone for Spotify download cache. When I upgrade my iPhone, I don't have to redownload anything. It's really nice to be able to use cheap microSD media for this type of music caching. It's also full Android, so I can run syncthing on it and just drop music into a folder on my desktop which will automatically get picked up by the device. It has really good battery life because it's not trying to be very thin. And it has dedicated hardware buttons for track changing and volume. I'm very happy with it. And it wasn't very expensive.

Bluetooth means it works with my airpods and cars, and file playback means I am once again listening to all the music that I love that isn’t on Spotify.

Also, a big microSD means I can throw Organic Maps on it and keep offline maps handy without using iPhone storage, too.

Huge life hack.

It has further led me to buy an android tablet with microSD just for the stuff iOS is bad at (eg emulators, torrenting, cheap storage for movie archives, etc).