I still remember the time when listening to music on my MP3 player was one of the only source of entertainment for me in high school. I was a student at a boarding school, where phones are contrabands, so te MP3 player was my only escape throughout the five years I was there.

But then came the smartphone.

Now, you don’t need a separate music player to store and listen to your favourite artists. You can play music directly from your phone, with apps like Spotify and Milk Music, which also offer buck loads of extra features, humongous cloud storage and offline streaming. Set with sound-enhancing speakers or headphones, there is really little reason left to use the MP3 to listen to music.

So, I was surprised to see a young woman whipped out an MP3 player, while I was on the train on my way to work despite having a smartphone that can do so much more.

Due to the extremely fast evolving tech industry, most of us probably do not realise the gigantic leaps in technological advancement that we have taken in the past decade. We went from bulky, pricey portable music players with short battery lives and irksome copy-protection schemes, to unlimited streaming of music on our phone in just 17 years.

Did you know that the first MP3 player, invented in 1998 by Korea’s Saehan Information Systems called MPMan F10, had a measley 32MB of Flash storage, which can hold up only up to eight songs?

Eight songs.

That’s hardly a full music album. Carrying a small brick size music player that contains only eight songs sounds crazy when you consider the millions of songs you can get from your slim and sleek smartphones these days.

Even crazier, in the year 2000, if you want a smaller players with bigger storage, it could easily have cost you US$2,000. With that kind of money today, I’m better off buying the new Surface Book and I’d still have money left over.

Some of you may even still remember when the Sony walkman was considered a luxury rather tahn a forgotten gadget of another era.

If you were an iPod fans, or still are, then you probably know that the first generation iPod was manufactured in 2001 with a 5GB hard drive, its own iTunes software and a chic off-white body that made it look premium. iPod became a hit when Apple came up with iTunes Music Store and its own digital rights management protection to the songs.

Apple continued to produce more music players that cater to every consumer trends like the smaller, no-screen iPod shuffle and the first ever touch-screen MP3, iPod Touch.

The innovations on MP3 players continue to evolve as companies like Archos and Creative started making devices that can display both images and video, and smaller players with longer battery life and colour screen.

However, as more functions are added onto the music players, its appeal starts to collide with the use of smartphone which also aims at incorporating as many functions as possible on one device, including playing and storing music.

There are some who still carry around a dedicated MP3 player because they like having a separate device to store their musics or because they are fans of the iPod. MP3 players are still very relevant to people who do not have unlimited data connection or storage on their smartphone. Especially to those who doesn’t own a smartphone, MP3 players are very useful to listen to music on the go, when yu can get it as cheap as RM20.

Nevertheless, with cloud-streamed music app expanding its reach and smartphone makers selling phones to cater low range market, we may see no more of those rare moments when we are surprised to remember that something like an MP3 player ever existed before.