Those were something, weren't they? I thought it was the coolest thing ever as a kid, just the absolute peak of technology.
And in hindsight... Yeah, it was a pretty comfortable way to play videos and music, wasn't it? And the click wheel iPods even had a surprisingly decent selection of games.
While I'm here, whatever happened to those Kindle e-readers with the physical page turn buttons and keyboard? I kinda feel like they stopped selling those, but I feel like that was kind of preferable to a touch screen, too.
I guess just in general I don't like touch screens and it'll be a good day when they stop being integrated into things that don't actually need them. I'm out here thinking that flip phones beat smartphones still
The Sandisk Sansa e200s had the worst software ever (hey let me spend 10 mins rebuilding metadata indices every single time you add or remote one track) but the clickwheel felt so goddamned good.
Modern consumer technology design has largely stripped away our ability to experience devices as things in the natural world/as designed things. Its all this freaking software crap!!!!!!!!!!!!
the wheels are like a funny little hack to this problem
the kobo i bought like 2 years ago still has those page turn buttons :) no keyboard tho
If you srill have your e200, Rockbox makes it smooth and you can run Doom.
The wheel went bad on mine so I swapped it for a later wheeled model and 2x the price of a generic MP4 player of similar size, but it wasn't the same; I found it in my box of dead phones a few weeks ago, the soft-touch coating all sticky yuck.
yea i found the e200 wheels were nice to start but they got really mushy after a while. i can see why you replaced it
Omg you just reminded me I had a sansa fuze and it had a wonderful physical click wheels. I think the software on it was better than what you described but I put Rockbox on it once I learned that I could. It ran Doom quite well.
I also had a Fuze, that physical wheel was fantastic. I also Rockbox'd it, worked great.
Lol oh shit I had one too! My cheap dad refused to pay for an ipod, so we had a rotation of off brand mp3 players