4 ms·

Why does it have no buttons? There are plenty of good rockbox able MP3 players on the market. What I need is buttons with feedback.

• andai 3y ago
  The cool thing about mp3 players and phones with physical buttons is you could control them in your pocket with one hand while riding a bcycle to school. I remember texting someone on a T9 numpad, once you got the hang of it you could do it with the phone behind your back! Later I had the worst designed mp3 player created by man which despite having physical buttons, still required you to look at the screen to use it because button presses were (a) context specific (required sequences) and (b) not idempotent (the first press was ignored and brought the device out of sleep mode).
• greenbit 3y ago
  I wish interface designers would understand this, the value of physical buttons. There seems to be this universal push to make everything as much like a phone as possible - flat, smooth touch controls, and while that's dandy for a device that you're already going to be looking at, it's an absolute hindrance in other contexts. Because now that device that you could have operated in your pocket, or while keeping an eye on something else, that device now demands your attention. Cognitive load is incurred where it need not be. You get the same problem sometimes even with physical buttons, when some bright spark decides it would be clever for some control range to "wrap around". Where once you could just hold the button for a second to get to the end of the range, and know where the device is w/o looking, and then tap N times to get what you want, now you have to stop whatever else you were trying to do, look at the device's display, and adjust the thing under full attention. Not everything needs to be a touch screen, or present 'smart' controls.
• pseudalopex 3y ago
  It has buttons. 2 on the side and a click wheel.