This €38 android-powered mp3 player slaps spotify into your pocket—no phone required

The smartphone didn’t kill the MP3 player; it just made most of them cowardly. While Apple herds nostalgia toward overpriced bricks, a Shenzhen start-up called MECHEN is shipping a 4-inch touchscreen slab that boots android 10, streams Spotify, Amazon Music and Deezer straight from Google Play, and still slides under a festival wristband—for €38 with the coupon NDES04.

Smartphones are exhausting; this gadget isn’t

Inside the anodised aluminium shell sits an eight-core Rockchip RK3326, 2GB RAM and a microSD slot that swallows 512GB more. Translation: you can walk the Camino de Santiago twice and never recycle a song. The 2000mAh cell is rated at 50 hours of continuous FLAC—triple what a flagship phone dares on airplane mode.

HiBy’s pre-loaded player app chews through every audiophile codec you can spell—FLAC, WAV, APE, DSD—while the 3.5mm jack pushes 110dB SNR. Bluetooth 4.1 is bidirectional, so the MECHEN doubles as a wireless DAC for your laptop when Zoom fatigue hits.

Parents get a babysitter, kids get freedom

Parental controls baked into the firmware whitelist apps and cap daily screen minutes. Result: a €38 firewall between TikTok addiction and homework. The same firmware lets adults sideload Tidal, Qobuz or their own VPN’d Bandcamp collection without rooting.

AliExpress has already moved north of 8,000 units this month; warehouses in Spain and Poland keep EU delivery under five days. Stock of the 16GB variant—code-named M300—is thinning fastest, resellers admit, because the 38-euro coupon expires when the counter kisses 10,000 redemptions.

Is it perfect? The 480x800 screen won’t wow videophiles, and android 10 is two desserts behind. But the maths is brutal: a second-hand iPod Classic costs triple, does less, and still forces iTunes on you. MECHEN ships a USB-C cable, a silicone case and a conscience—no subscriptions, no lock-in, no notification avalanche. Plug, swipe, disappear.