Having kept up to date with this thread, I just wanted to add my impressions for the record.
I seem to be one of the lucky ones that is pretty much 100% happy with my unit. After my initial disappointment of not being instantly wowed by the sound, I have steadily grown to appreciate just how awesome this player sounds, especially for a portable unit.
The minor gripes I have with it, I have learnt to work around or just ignore them.
Yes I agree that for the price paid the GUI and functionality should be a hell of a lot better. However, if I valued (perceived) ease of use over sound quality, I would choose a different player.
I appreciate that this is a small company with limited money and resources and only so much can be achieved and ironed out before it has to go to market to begin paying for itself.
So I am willing to live with the minor niggles, while the audiophile community beta test it....for me, as soon as the first song starts playing, everything is forgiven.
Having said that, there are a few things I would really like to see improved:
The pops when coming out of sleep or when first powered on - for now, I try to remember to not plug my IEMs in until its up running
Slow wakeup and indexing - power it up a few minutes before I want to use it
Get rid of all cr@p that runs in the background - as with all my android devices, I immediately rooted it and then installed a Task Killer - now I wait for it to power up and kill all tasks\services except the music app.
Longer battery would be nice - I just make sure I regularly charge it up or play it with the charger on
Album art - nice to have but not important as I dont sit and look at the art work while songs are playing
Smaller and lighter form.
All my music loads and plays in numbered order and as I tend to play by album and rarely skip songs, so I dont really have any issues in that department.
I love this player so much that I have now got rid of my cowons and will probably get rid of my HM-601 - this is the only sound I want.
After reading about the sound changes in v1.2.3 I decided to stay on 1.1.7
I play only FLACs and 24bit on it