Introduction

I’ve been enjoying standalong MP3 players! The Innioasis Y1 kept coming across my radar, I like the the form factor, it was $50.

What the heck, why not.

And Then

The community for this thing is insane, it’s just as active as the people doing weird things with my RG35XX. It’s really cool seeing so many people doing neat things with such a simple piece of hardware. And like the RG35XX, part of the value proposition is this is a cheap peice of commodity hardware that would not have been possible in this way even 5 years ago, but is now inexpensive enough and flexible enough to be an incredible product for the money.

Rockbox

I saw you could put a flavor of Rockbox on the thing so I did that. The UI out of the box isn’t nearly as polished but there’s a neat community-supported updater that goes so far as to install skins for you. I’m currently using another Adwaita adaptation I found on the y1 subreddit which handles CJK correctly, which turns out to be important to me.

Rockbox has the ability to create a play log file, so I can scrobble my commute/work listening again! This is awesome.

Final Thoughts

Three surprises. Not quite complaint territory but worth knowing about:

• No external storage. My Shanlings had a TF card slot so I could expand and swap the storage easily. This is internal. 128GB so it won’t hold my whole library but it holds everything I care about.
• No touchscreen. Again, coming from Shanling this took a little bit of getting used to. Pure iPod classic ergonomics, buttons only.
• Build quality is not super solid. The screen is plastic, not glass, and it scratched almost immediately. You can definitely “feel” a center of gravity while the majority of the device fgeels light. No metal in its construction. It doesn’t feel brittle but by no means is it a luxury experience.

This thing is a lot of fun to use, though! The novelty will eventually wear off but it feels good to have something iPod shaped in my life again.