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My experience of smartphones to date (and not necessarily the higher end ones) is that they all seem to lack sufficient volume for my ears. The last phone I had I had to root and alter the 'mixer_paths' file to lift the volume limits that they all seem to impose, once done they start replicating volumes similar to what you can buy from the mp3 player market. It's a pain, and rooting can be problematic, which is why I kinda stay away from using a phone as my main audio player.
I have a hard time judging sound quality unless I can get the thing to reach a volume (usually pretty loud) so that I can hear if it's able to hold that volume without distortion etc to what I'm used to hearing etc.
I put phones in a similar category of sound quality to Cowon players, that is they sometimes to my ears sound 'softwareish' in sound signature, meaning somewhat 'artificial'. It's not that they're bad or anything, and with Cowon you (usually) get massive volumes + a huge array of DSPs to play with that can sound really fun, and highly customsisable so that you can get that cold or warm signature, whatever floats your boat.
With something basic like the C3 or AP100 or Alien Shozy the sound feels more 'hardwarish', that is more basic, but stronger/powerful... I dunno it's hard to explain. And not all mp3 players are equal in power of volume, the C3 is my weakest > Alien Shozy (mid) > Ap100 (last, very powerful) in terms of power/volume output. The power means a lot to me as I usually shuffle and tend to impose somekind of replaygain across my entire music so I reach for the volume button less often than necessary.
Just my 2 cents.