☠️ Yo ho, yo ho...

Buy DRM free music instead of streaming it.

Well if you go apple you don't, but freedom is on Android. Flac is awesome

I had an Nokia, my last “featurephone” before I got my first smartphone, which actually had an FM tuner built-in. It used the headphone wire as an antenna as far as I recall. Quite neat, not that I ever really used it, but it was perfectly serviceable. And a great way of having music on the go in the days before streaming music was widely available.

Some androids have fm radios and it uses the headphone cable as an antenna.

I had a Motorola that did it and I think my workphone has it too.

Weirdly, I'm pretty sure Qualcomm chips still include an FM tuner. Most manufacturers just decide not to enable it and hook up the antenna.

I still have FM on my phone. Poco X3 Pro

They're in your bum, aren't they?

I think the point is that the formats have basically been unified into fully digital formats. Though we still use Bluetooth speakers to replace boomboxes and audio stacks.

They all played music but they didn’t serve the same purpose, thus why I had all three. The CD player was for listening in my room, the boombox could be brought anywhere, and the Walkman was for privately listening on the go.

Not from every phone, when I was looking for a cheap phones, a lot of Chinese brands still had FM radio.

GPS.

Unless meant, like, cumulatively. In that case it's more dependent on your choices than the tech itself.

Yes. My life is objectively, measurably, better because of the smartphone in my hand.

There are elements to life that have drastically changed for the better, to name one example how about not just being able to hear your local radio stations, but radio from anywhere in the world.

The fact that I can tune in live to... say BBC Radio 6, and be listening along to the exact same thing they're listening to in a city like London, makes a measurable positive impact in my night-owl life. It emotionally makes me feel more connected to the outside world from where I am, and that's one station out of hundreds of thousands, if not millions. I can explore the world.

Another example is that I can now understand (to the extent that each step makes sense to me) the physics theories and laboratory experiments that have changed our paradigm of reality itself, thanks to a whole bunch of science content creators on YouTube; it is incredible what can now be explained in relatively (ahem) simple language, and it is, by people doing the explaining as a labor of love.
People have found ways to express in mostly non-technical language what a couple of decades ago felt like abstract numerical gibberish wherever one looked. I find this spectacular. And inspiring.

These new tools that have been put in our hands are astonishingly powerful and profound. Yet of course, they can be both either used or abused. Here, I am focusing solely on the "used" side.

You jest, but the industry was pretty close to having something like that. VHS-C format tapes are the key, as they were used in lightweight camcorders back in the 90's. The viewfinder used an active screen, so this could be used for playback anywhere.

If we ditched the optics and stretch the definition of "pocket", this is basically that: https://www.ebay.com/itm/386925509292?chn=ps&mkevt=1&mkcid=28