I am writing this post on a device that by convention I call a phone. The name isn’t utterly ridiculous; it is certainly capable of making and receiving phone calls. But by the same token I could just as easily call it a pocket calculator. It fits in my pocket and has a calculator function, after all.

I won’t go on. A few years ago it was topical to to marvel at the fact that the contraptions we called phones had grown into multi-purpose personal computing and communications devices. But by now that’s been covered from multiple angles by writers far more eloquent than I. The changing roles and capabilities of smartphones is a subject I am ill-equipped to discuss here. Particularly as I was late to the party. Although I had considered the possibility several times in the past, it was only recently that I finally took the plunge and replaced my venerable dumbphone.

Last time I had an exciting personal electronic device, I blogged about it on here a few times. But this time it’s a device whose strengths and weaknesses are fairly common knowledge; if you don’t know by now that the Samsung Galaxy S4 is an excellent smartphone then you probably don’t much care either. So I won’t go into too much detail. Suffice it to say that I am very pleased with it in all respects bar one. I don’t much like the default music player and I can’t find a replacement on Google Play that I’m happy with either.

Now, I’m sure that for most people, the default player is fine and that for most of the rest something like Poweramp or PlayerPro or something is just great. But I’ve come to expect a music player to work in a very specific way and I find anything else awkward and irritating. I basically want it to work like my old iRiver player did once I’d installed Rockbox on it.

Fortunately, there is a project underway to port Rockbox to Android. It’s a bit temperamental at the moment but it essentially works. This would seem to be the answer. But there is one small problem. The screen.

Rockbox was originally designed to run on only a limited range of hardware and so the way it draws it’s user interface didn’t need to scale particularly well. When installing on Android, this means that you will need a skin that fits your screen. The official package includes skins for a few (quite low) resolutions but for higher resolutions you’re left to fend for yourself.

Now, as it happens, my Galaxy S4 has a very high resolution screen indeed. And even the largest skin I’ve been able to find for it (which would fit the Galaxy S3) is small and cramped as it only takes up about half of the screen. So now I have myself a project: learn how to design a skin (properly called a WPS) for Rockbox to fit a 1080×1920 screen. I’d also like to see about building a custom .apk for Rockbox so that the appropriate-resolution WPS is built-in rather than having the files that make it up cluttering up the visible part of the device’s storage and appearing in places like the phone’s image gallery.

Then, of course, I’ll have to start putting well over 20GiB of music onto the MicroSD card that I have in the phone. And finally I shall see how using a smartphone as a portable music player compares with using a dedicated personal DAP.

Fortunately, the school holidays start next week, so I’ll have a bit of spare time to do all this in. Hurrah!