@miikerman wrote:
Plus, perhaps, built-in obsolescence, with people needing to buy a new player when the battery runs down?
I’ve never had one long enough for the battery to die…it must take a good long while.
That’s just because you’re addicted and keep buying the newest and the greatest. 
I am hoping that Sandisk comes out with some more capable players. The last two players I bought were made by a company other than Sandisk. I wanted something more capable than Sandisk currently offers.
I am hoping Sandisk comes out with a player under $100 that has HD radio, two card slots, bluetooth, a metal case, and 40+ hours of battery life.
From your mouth to heaven’s ears . . . . I’ve written of wanting a metal-cased Uber-Clip for years, seeing them in platinum, gold and bronze varieties.
But, does any current player have two card slots? (And I can’t exactly recall one from the past, although I have a faint recollection that there might have been one.) My guess is, with the declining price of microSDXC cards (I scored a major manufacturer 128GB microSDXC card for just under US$30 this past Black Friday–although this probably is not exactly a fair comparison), DAP manfs. might see multiple slots as unnecessary. Having said that, a 256+GB DAP would be sweet. :)
There are now a few players that have two microSD card slots. I haven’t noticed any with 4 slots yet. The players I have noticed with two card slots are all over $100, with some even over $1,000. They also have short battery life, 11 hours or less. With the increasing interest in FLAC and especially high resolution files, having multiple card slots makes sense. I guess something like 300 CDs ripped to FLAC fit on a 128GB card? Some people have music collections with thousands of CDs, and to carry it all in FLAC they might need a player with 16 card slots. Before we see players with 8 card slots though, we will need to see at least a few with 4 card slots.
I almost exclusively listen to audiobooks. So my ideal mp3-audiobook-player…
- …is very small in size.
- …has a clip-on.
- …has a decent battery life.
- …has a micro-sd port where I can add audiobooks in mp3 format.
- …allows me to play the files from the directories in the intended order.
- …has physical insensitive buttons, because I’m using it in my pocket while commuting.
- …has enough power to scroll through big audio files and will speed up the scrolling the longer I press the scroll button.
- …will remember where I paused the playback or shut off the mp3-player under any circumstances.
- …will start up very fast and play right away from the position the playback has been. Maybe 5 seconds before, to get back into the story easier.
- …has an equilizer to balance the voices to make up for cheap headphones.
And that’s about it.
- it doesn’t need is a lot of Internal space.
- It only needs a very basic screen, no need for visualizing colorful covers.
- It doesn’t need a radio.
- It doesn’t need a microphone. (Although I’m using this feature a lot in my beloved sansa clip+)
- The small size and the better battery life is the reason to not use my phone instead.
The result is very cheap hardware with a few specific software requirements.