First of all

This is a really nice piece of hardware. Build quality, design and overall concept are excellent. I really want to like and use this device as a daily player.

However, in real-world usage I have encountered several issues that significantly affect usability and playback behavior (tested on Version 1.65). I am sharing this as structured feedback in the hope that it helps improve the product.

Bugs / Inconsistent behavior

1. Inconsistent behavior: touch controls vs. physical buttons

The behavior of playback controls is not consistent between the touchscreen, Bluetooth commands, and the physical buttons.

The physical NEXT button (via volume control, configurable in V1.65) behaves differently from both the on-screen NEXT button and Bluetooth commands.

A) NEXT behavior

Touch / Bluetooth:
Pressing NEXT always skips to the next track (expected behavior)

Physical button:
If the track has been playing for less than approximately 10 seconds, NEXT works as expected.
After approximately 10 seconds of playback, pressing NEXT restarts the current track instead of skipping to the next one.

This behavior is 100 percent reproducible across all play modes and button configurations and significantly affects usability.

B) PREVIOUS behavior

Touch / Bluetooth:
“Previous” correctly returns to the previously played track (even in random mode)

Physical button:
The “Previous” button behaves differently and appears to select a random track instead of following playback history.

Physical controls, touch controls, and Bluetooth commands should behave identically.
Currently, they trigger different playback logic.

2. Random (shuffle) mode issues

There are multiple problems with shuffle playback.

When pressing Next, the player sometimes plays the track that was played immediately before the current one, instead of selecting a new random track.

This happens regularly enough to be clearly noticeable and feels like a bug.

Expected behavior:
Previous should follow playback history
Next should select a new random track without immediate repeats

Playback history:
Again, there is a difference between touch and physical buttons.
Using the “Previous” touch control follows playback history correctly, while using the physical “Previous” button generates a new random track.

Usability / UI issues

3. Touch target size (Next / Previous buttons)

The touch areas for Next and Previous are too small.

I often miss the buttons, especially due to parallax when the player is lying on a desk.
Missing the touch area leads to unintended UI behavior and requires several additional taps to recover and try again.

At the same time:

The Play/Pause button has a large circular touch area and strong visual emphasis.
The Next and Previous icons are visually similar in size, which suggests similar interaction areas, but their actual touch areas are much smaller. This leads to unintended behavior and a poor user experience.

This is misleading and negatively affects usability.

Feature gaps / improvements

4. Library navigation (essential)

A proper hierarchy is missing:

Album Artist to Album to Song

This is essential for larger music libraries and standard on most players, as it reflects how users typically navigate their collections.

In its current state, the lack of this categorization is a major limitation for standalone use.

5. Playlist support

The current functionality is too limited for the intended use case.

For a device designed as a portable player with large storage capacity, playlist support is not optional but a core feature. Without it, managing and using larger music libraries in a practical way becomes very difficult.

Suggested improvements:

Minimum: support for widely used playlist formats such as m3u and m3u8
Ideally: extended format support such as pls and cue, and playlist management directly on the device

6. USB DAC volume control (general host usage)

When using the device as a USB DAC, for example with macOS:

The system volume cannot be controlled from the host.
The device behaves like a fixed-volume output.

While technically valid, this significantly limits usability.

Given that the device is designed to be used as a portable DAC with smartphones or computers, host-side volume control would be highly desirable and expected in many real-world usage scenarios.

7. Album artwork / visual browsing (enhancement)

Browsing the library is currently text-based only.

Especially for album navigation, it would be highly beneficial to support a visual view using album artwork instead of a pure text list.

For many users, album artwork is a primary way of recognizing and selecting music. This would significantly improve usability and browsing speed, while still allowing integration with existing scrolling behavior.

Suggested improvement:

Add an optional cover-based view for albums, for example a grid or list with thumbnails
Potentially extend this to other sections where appropriate

Summary

The device has excellent hardware and sounds great, but there are several significant UI and UX issues:

Core playback behavior is inconsistent
Controls (touch versus physical) do not match
Shuffle logic is flawed
Several key features are missing

Addressing these points would significantly improve the overall experience and align the device more closely with how users typically browse and use music on modern players. It would also make the device much easier to recommend.

I understand that the firmware is still evolving and the device is relatively new, and I hope that user feedback like this can be useful for further development.

I hope this feedback is received as constructive and helpful.