Agree with everything you said. One thing that you left out was playlist management. It’s completely unusable. If you just play everything on random or only ever play albums start-to-end, fine. Otherwise DO NOT BUY ANY SHANLING DEVICE. Worse than any device I’ve ever used, including pokey little Sansa Clip with tiny display, no touch and only 5 buttons to do everything. Playlist management on the MTouch OS deserves its own separate review just to catalog the number of ways that it fails.

1. Copying playlists to the Q1 is not intuitive. I’ve never had a player that mad this more complicated than “drag the playlist to the device”. On the Q1 you have to first create a specially named folder on the SD card (because the device does not do this itself) and then copy playlists to it….. And then you have to specially instruct the Q1 to import the playlists! It doesn’t do this automatically.
2. Artist/Title metadata in imported playlists is ignored, and the device does not even try to load the metadata from the files. When you browse through imported playlists, tracks are displayed using the filename only, so “Under the milkyway” by “The Church” looks like:
   0-02 - Under the milky…
   Unknown Artist
3. The only way to get proper artist/track metadata on a playlist is to create the playlist on the device. This is where the Q1 playlist experience goes from ‘terrible’ to ‘I’m throwing this f**king thing out of a moving car while crossing a bridge over a river of lava’. If you want to browse your tracks and add to a playlist, it takes a minimum of 6 gestures per track (that’s if you don’t have to do any scrolling to choose an artist/track off the first page). Honestly, I tried making a 10 track playlist and wanted to stamp on this thing.
   Oh yeah, and if you are in the “Now Playing” screen and you use the “+” shortcut to add that track to a playlist, it’s still clunky, but worse… if your “Now Playing” track happens to come from an imported playlist, then, even though “Now Playling” has loaded up the Artist/Track metadata from the track for its UI, it doesn’t add them to the new playlist! Yup! You still get the “0–05 - filename.mp3” and “Unknown Artist”.

Aside from this omission, your review is spot-on. Nice battery life, beautiful (if heavy) device, excellent sound quality and DAC/USB/bluetooth features. However, I would stress, underline and embolden your text on the terrible UI. It’s honestly the worst UI I have ever used on any MP3 player ever, and I’ve been using MP3 players since the Diamond Rio. It’s sluggish, frequently ignores swipes, has no tap-and-hold for menus, doesn’t have a keyboard/search… and all of these things are multiplied by the insane UI layout. The most frequently used screens should be in the pull-down menu, but instead we get TWO icons that bring you to the settings and none that takes you to “Now Playing” or the current playlist (which is actually ‘hidden’ and takes a cryptic swipe-right, swipe-left to access).

My overall review for the Q1 is “Do not buy this thing even though it looks and sounds great”, 2 stars.