My new M23 is pretty sweet. There are some pretty ret*rded one-star reviews out there. I'd give it a 4-star. 5-star for sound and features. -1 star for lack of obvious features in an android handheld device -- rotation sensor (to allow landscape orientation, which is disabled), luminance sensor (to auto-adjust screen-brightness), haptic feedback (which is part of being able to "feel" sound segments labelled by type in my app #TrainsPODder for which I wanted to see how it functions on a DAP), and fingerprint sensor (for unlocking if you were dumb enough to set a PIN lock code). It's kind of silly they use a tiny speaker to make clicking noises when you scrub the "volume touch panel" which you wouldn't hear if you have headphones on. What would make sense is a haptic feedback do a short pulse when adjusting volume that way. Likewise many apps use haptic feedback to confirm actions, alert the user, or even globally, just to provide feedback while typing.
But it happily goes into developer mode and lets you set some under-hood parameters, and allows for easy file transfer and sync via "adb", as well as letting you side-load any app you want (such as the ones I'm writing
).
Someone needs to develop an app that reads SQUIG link parameters and sets up an equalization automatically within the built-in equalizer app. In fact one of these days I'll probably get so annoyed by the process of manually setting EQs that I'll see whether it's possible to hack that in somehow. Although actually my favorite phones (pre-harmaned IEMs) don't need any EQ to begin with, and sound worse, or just different, but not necessarily better, with various suggested EQ curves...
It also passes the "car" test in that you can set the 1/4" out to line-out (i use 4.4mm for headphones) and it doesn't seem to generate the kind of "phone noise" into the Aux input on my 13-yo car that my LG-V60 does, or even LG-V60 connected to Fiio BTR15 via USB. The sound is a lot beefier too. I'm glad my OEM car soundsystem (supposedly made by Dynaudio) has a decent-sounding (other than noise susceptible) auxiliary input, and that it automatically switches over to bluetooth if a phone call comes in.
