I suspect it's because the point of those things is to be a show-case, so large size is OK. If you want a small music player/recorder, there are many SD-card b

I suspect it's because the point of those things is to be a show-case, so large size is OK. If you want a small music player/recorder, there are many SD-card based models, and some of them are absolutely tiny, while providing much better sound quality.