Probably the only good reason to get android DAP are streaming services. And there is Hiby R5 gen. 2 which also has a great battery. But it is not particularly small
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Agreed!
Though I personally stay far away from anything that requires a subscription, there are far too many of those these days for my taste. I much prefer having all my music stored on my computer and my audio players, where I can play them anytime without requiring internet access or any extra fees.
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streaming services are a life saver for me, with the amount of music I listen to if I bought it all I would always be broke even if I stopped buying new audio gear lol.
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The Hifi Walker H2 I ordered arrived, I loaded it up with music and tested it out with the Meze 99 Noir headphones I am giving away as a gift to a nephew for christmas. Turns out, it’s pretty great. Not the best thing out there, I like my Plenue D more… even though that’s older.
But the HiFi Walker is definitely what I would call ‘Good Enough’. The EQ options on the HiFi Walker could be better, but it sounds fine on the default setting, it can handle a lot of songs, the interface is good, except for needing to hit power to ‘wake up’ the unit to change volume or tracks. I see the argument for disabling the buttons too, especially if you are carrying it in a pocket with other stuff, you wouldn’t want to hit a button by accident, so locking out the buttons when the screen is off… it’s a matter of taste I guess. I prefer having the buttons still active, but it works fine the way it is. Just adds 1 button press there.
From my testing the battery life is plenty good enough with the Meze 99 Noir I tested. (I did not plug in my Argon’s, that wouldn’t be fair, and probably wouldn’t work terribly well because Argon’s use power like it’s going out of style, most portables can’t handle them properly.)
I’d say it’s a good unit for the money.
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https://www.amazon.com/dp/B072C4YPCG
This is the one I picked up. It’s going to be a gift for one of my nephews to get him into better audio.
Another competing unit is this one, same price, basically the same product with a slightly different i-pod style wheel. The Surfans F20 has a metal selection wheel instead of a rubberized surface. But otherwise they are exactly the same product. The only difference would be if you prefer the metal wheel over the rubberized one.
- Oh, and it looks like the corners are more rounded on the HiFi Walker H2, and the Surfans F20 is more squared off. I think I prefer the HiFi Walker H2 - the rounded corners means it will feel better in-hand, and no pointy bits to poke you while it’s in a pocket.
https://www.amazon.com/iRULU-F20-Bluetooth-Lossless-Resolution/dp/B07VWK4FP3/
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Still finding the F.Audio XS02 to be great sounding, and long-lasting for battery life. The opamps I ordered from Aliexpress should be here pretty soon, it’ll be interesting to see how they alter a sound I already like. The interface would be a hassle, no doubt. It’s my “shuffle” player. Can be controlled without having to look at it, with very definite clicky confirmation. Much bulkier than a traditional “shuffle” player like Apple’s Shuffles or the Sansa Clip or others listed above.
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Ooooh… that button setup on the F.Audio XS02 looks painful.
How long does it take to get used to?
There seem to be a lot of players all around the same price and general size, I suspect they all use slight variations on the same hardware. Might be interesting to see if someone has cracked them open to compare the internals on them.
This one is made to be easy to crack open, hence the op-amp swap.
The buttons are really intuitive actually.
The Aune M2 Pro is one that would take longer to get used to, it has limited buttons and one way of getting around that is things like pressing 2 buttons at the same time counts as different to either on their own - it has some neat ways to quickly flip through whole pages of artist/album/that kind of listing before swapping to something more granular when you get close. That’s the kind of thing that would take some muscle memory and practice I think, like setting up layers on a tiny keyboard.
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I actually just got an R3 Saber from the for sale thread here and a full charge playing only local FLAC (quality ranging from 16/44.1 to 24/192) played for 10 hrs so far and it still has 22% left. This was all off the 2.5mm balanced jack, but just with IEMs that required very low volume/power.
Just adding my anecdotal experience/evidence to the pile. 
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Not to be a know it all, but the Surfans actually uses a slightly lower version of the Burr-Brown PCM series DAC chips than the H2 and it has slightly less driving power. I own the H2 and I had someone ask about the F20 and whether it was the same thing. Looking online it’s easy enough to find the DAC chip difference, but, being the curious person I am, I had to buy an F20 and do some side by side testing to catch the driving power difference. BTW, the difference is very small and only noticeable if you’re essentially maxing out the power which I wouldn’t recommend anyways. Just putting this out there as an FYI for anybody who might come across this while reading or researching these players.
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Thanks for the info! That is quite interesting that they are so similar.
To update my thoughts on battery life, I set the HiFi Walker H2 to 60 out of 100 volume level, on Low Gain, hooked up to Meze 99 Noir headphones, and let it run from a fully charged battery playing music with the bluetooth and screen turned off, until it ran completely out of power. The music type played was a mixture of FLAC and high resolution MP3 files.
- It lasted for about 16 hours before it conked out.
Nowhere near the run time of the old Cowon Plenue D players, but still very respectable for players of this modern era.
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