First post on Head-Fi, and I'm more than happy to talk about my HiFi Walker H2.
I'm currently in the process of transitioning from smart phone to flip phone and ditching streaming services in favour of curating my own media libraries. As part of this, I just bought myself a Christmas present consisting of a HiFi Walker H2 as opposed to a cheap $40 mp3-only player (e.g. SanDisk or Majority) and I have to say I'm very happy I did so. I'm very impressed with the build quality, with a size, weight, and interface (buttons!) that seem perfect for me. Coincidentally, having a player that's designed specifically to output good audio pairs nicely with my desire to treat my ears well.
Currently pairing the H2 (version 1.8) with Sennheiser PXC 550-II headphones and KZ KSN Pro X IEMs, and honestly, I think this is the kind of audio set up that I've been missing since I gave up on my 120gb iPod Classic over a decade ago. It's all still relatively affordable (that said, $400 combined is still a high price for some), and more importantly I feel like I'm getting back a sense of specificity with the technology that I'm choosing to use.
My next step is to try out Rockbox to replace the current firmware (V1.8 I believe). I could live with the current interface, but still find some of the controls a little clunky or inconvenient. Specifically, I'm a little disappointed that the only way to use the media control buttons is to have the player unlocked with screen on, and not the biggest fan of how playback modes (random/repeat all/repeat one etc) are both configured and managed. In the end I'll be happy to live with those for the price.
There is a single issue that I think could just be a quality issue - is anyone aware of reports on the scroll wheel "skipping" for the H2 or the similar clones/rebrands of the Eros Q/K, i.e. Surfans F20, AGPTek H2? Specifically, I usually need to get 2 "clicks" from the scroll wheel for the in-software cursor to index by 1 position, but every so often it works 1:1 for a few clicks before going back to the 2:1 behaviour. I'm trying to figure out if this is a quality issue I should bother trying to chase down, but at this price point I think I'm willing to accept that the scroll wheel is sloppy.