> Making a DAC what "works" is probably quite trivial. Making one that can
> isolate all the signal noise from the rest of the phone, handle sudden
> transients while being powered only by a feeble half-flat battery, and
> so on and so forth is probably much harder.

But you're still only talking about 20 kHz signals, the rest of the 
phones deals with exactly those same issues for frequencies many orders 
of magnitudes higher.  The audio DAC is probably one of the simplest 
parts in the phone for the designers to do.

> Then again, it's MP3, so it probably won't sound fantastic anyway.
> Certainly most people are going to plug in those horrid £2 things from
> the market, so the quality of the electronic signal is quite irrelevant.

Exactly, they're not really expecting Mr Hi-Fi to connect up his 30 quid 
Nokia to a 20k hi-fi with a gold-plated half-inch-thick 2xphono to 3.5mm 
cable.  At best they are expecting you to connect a 100 quid pair of 
headphones to it and listen on the train, and in that case I doubt most 
people would be able to tell the difference between having a phone or an 
mp3 player connected up.

> Far more problematic than carrying the player is carrying the large £30
> headphones I usually use it with.

Invest in a smaller pair for when it's not practical to carry the large 
pair?  I rarely take my large pair out of the house (long-haul flights 
is one example where I do make the effort to carry the big pair).

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