Interesting. I just use a thumb drive in my car with a ton of MP3s on it (which would achieve what the Zen Stone did), but cars didn't have USB inputs in 2007 so I see how the Stone could be useful.

For standard music listening though, I have not been able to find anything that beats the iPod's touch wheel. Load rockbox onto an iPod classic (swap out the HDD with an SD card), and it is hard to beat IMO. You can store FLAC/Vorbis/MP3/WAV whatever it is you have, and you then have a device that is just for music with none of the distractions that smart phones bring. It has really transformed how I listen to music, because I am connected to a device that is designed for just playing music with no bells or whistles.

The book "The Inner History of Devices" (https://sherryturkle.com/books-research/inner-history-device...) talks about the anthropology of how we connect to our devices, and how this connection is of course associated with everything that we do with our phones. Music blends into web browsing that becomes numbing, which blends into phone calls, which blends into messaging, etc ...

I can now leave my phone at home, and just carry my iPod with me, and the fact that the device I have on me is for music, and nothing else, changes how I experience it. It is super easy to navigate throughout your music collection with the touch wheel, whereas most other MP3 players have a mediocre touch screen that is laggy/unresponsive (https://www.sony.com/electronics/walkman/nw-a30-series/buy/n...) or buttons that are just as cumbersome to use.

Pretty sad that Apple discontinued their iPod line and how most enjoyable music solutions require a device with an IP stack. The "essence" of the devices that play music seem to distance us from the music, because our music falls into the category of all of the other apps, like Netflix, our internet browsers, or social media if you use it ...