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.

As a FiiO X5K user, I can’t say the FiiO X7’s hardware upgrades excite me much. I never bothered reading closely about which chips it upgraded or what tech it uses, because sound-wise the X5K already satisfies me — at least it has way more driving power than the ZX1, and the basics are good enough. Tuning is all smoke and mirrors anyway; you can fix it with earbuds. But one thing about the X5K always grated on me: the UI. FiiO already has the best UI among Chinese DAPs, but the X5K’s godawful dot-matrix font and lack of touch support drove me crazy after getting used to Sony’s stuff. Browsing for songs was a nightmare. And the kicker: even though the X5K handles album art and other metadata well enough, song names in the file list still show up as filenames. I was stuck navigating piles of 1.XXXX-XXX.flac, and since a lot of them start with album numbers, sorting to find anything was hopeless. I gave up on that idea. You can probably guess what I’m getting at. The biggest win of the X7 for me is the brand-new touch-controlled UI. When I first heard FiiO was making an Android player, I was worried about a Chinese Android playback UI — figured the best case was it barely escaping the shanzhai smell. But after the product came out and I watched some overseas review videos, it surprised me quite a bit. No need to beat around the bush: honestly, this UI is already pretty great.

A long time ago I didn’t like Chinese DAPs. They were ugly and the battery life was bad. Later the battery life at least improved a bit, getting into double digits at least, but they were still ugly. So now we’ve reached the point where Chinese DAPs finally look not-terrible and have passable battery life, but the gap in software experience is still a real wound. This is a fundamental gap. While world-class portable players give you all sorts of comfortable control experiences, our Chinese DAPs are still way behind on the basic function of “searching for songs.” All we can do is pull out “but our sound quality is better” to console ourselves, but the number of audiophiles willing to give up usability is small after all, and long-term self-numbing inside a small circle only leaves you further stuck in place. Fortunately, a manufacturer is finally willing to break through, and that’s FiiO.