Icon – Colorfly C4 Pro

Hey, Sir Patrick Moore called – he wants his calculator back.
Well, tell him we don’t have it. This thing here isn’t a calculator, nor even a portable music player. It’s a ‘pocket hi-fi’, aimed at people who have spent a couple of hundred quid on a set of swanky headphones and and want to feed them something tastier than the output from their iThing.

Does it come with a free monocle?
There’s no eye-furniture involved, but it does ship with 32GB of storage (plus microSD) for your WAVs, FLACs and MP3s, as well as earfuls of sumptuous noise. The Colorfly upsamples your digital tunes (a bit like a TV upscaling SD to full HD), then uses its 24bit/192kHz digital-to-analogue converter to produce an audiophile-friendly analogue output. You’ll find a quarter-inch socket on the base for your cans, but no 3.5mm jack – cheapo earbuds need not apply.

Is it Patrick Moore’s cigar box?
Stop it already. While it’s true that most gadgets try to look sleek, futuristic and maybe a little bit dangerous, the Colorfly has chosen the less-trodden path of looking like a 1970s Volvo. The display is laughable but the hand-tooled walnut back is nice and feels as warm and solid as an old soldier’s handshake. It couldn’t look more old-school if it ran on coal, but – like Sir Patrick Moore – it does one thing, and does it very well.

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