Found this for under $20 on ebay, a lil stained (but I think it looks kinda cool) but with a visible charged battery in the photos so I knew the battery was at least still kinda good. I'm learning at least a lil bit since the 2nd gen i bought and mutilated, and since I had the power of choice now, I went ahead and bought the one with the camera so I get a tad more bang for my buck

I do gotta say that it sounds really good, I know that it's a few years newer than my walkman but the music is just a lil sharper, like the parts between the notes are a pinch crisper. I would almost consider giving it a new battery and using it since it's also got 16 giggles, but all the controls are just a tad more inconvenient. They're still rlly good though, and the clickwheel is novel if you've never used one before. Here's some glamour shots I took with a document scanner

It also does feel a bit more towards the line of ipod touches, as it's got flash ui elements and built in games and such. Makes it feel a bit less like just a music player and more of it's own thing. Here's a video of me typing with the camera to give you an idea of the quality. Mildly dissapointed it can't take stills.

This also means that it has a built in speaker meant for video playback (though it can play mp3s through it too), it's not visible, so you can get an idea for it's quality. I wouldn't be surprised if they just reused the microphone as the speaker.

The main reason I bought this, though, is to be able to finally use my 30 pin powered mic attachment I got at a garage sale a year or so back.

It's pretty similar to a tascam, with a bunch of fancy features like L/R gain control, leds to monitor volume levels, a headphone out to monitor the audio, and even xlr and 1/4' aux inputs if I wanted to get really fancy with it

It's limited to recording to m4a files since that's what the ipod voice memo function can do, but it sounds miles better than the built in mic. Since the mics look like this, here's some obligatory mediocre asmr

Also I had no idea these weren't drag n drop. At least it doesn't use firewire like the first few but I still need a special cable and itunes. It's at least mildly drag n drop through itunes but it'd be much nicer to just use the filebrowser, and idk if it's just a me problem but the songs I add show up as twice the length once on the player? Like they play fine but just end when the scrubber is at the halfway point.

It is a pretty cool piece of hardware though, especially after i figured out my sony headphone inline controls work with it, and I'll prolly replace the battery before it starts bulging eventually