I’ve been using the FiiO X7 for a while now, and there are a few problems: When playing songs, it stalls once at intervals ranging from 30 seconds to 1 minute; the stall lasts about 20 seconds before playback resumes. Battery life feels like it should be around the official 9 hours, but standby is a real weak point. It ought to have auto-shutdown. Any artist name in English gets displayed in all caps. Firmware updates can only be done by copying to an SD card—it’s supposedly a smart device but doesn’t support Wi-Fi updates. The breathing light stays on constantly, which is light pollution at night. The machine formats cards as exfat, which doesn’t support long file names. So I was grumbling about all this when I saw FiiO had released firmware 1.3. The update method is the same as for older devices, but 1.3 did fix quite a few things. First, the breathing light is now configurable. Second, there’s now a mode that auto-shuts down after a set number of minutes in standby, so long standby periods won’t drain much battery. Overall it should now beat the ZX1. But the most infuriating problem—playback stopping—still isn’t fixed. I emailed FiiO, and they suggested I try a different card.