Well, you could use an old smartphone or other personal digital assistant that has an MP3 player application. While the speaker’s quality is poor, you can have your pick of interfaces and functions. I use my wife’s old phone, which has no telecom contract, as a PDA, ebook reader, podcast player, etc.

@danyhkim, good idea and I considered this as I have several unused smartphones sitting around. However I decided that I did not want to give my son such a device yet, capable of gaming, web browsing, etc. as well as being somewhat fragile.

I’ve ordered an ”AGPTEK M07” which is a small stand-alone mp3 player with a basic speaker. I’ll post back here if it winds up being good (or not…)

First, this site really needs a way to report spam.

Second, my son (now 9) has been playing with the AGPTEK M07 for a couple days now and it’s perfect for his use. I preloaded it with a 32Gb microSD card with (almost) all of my music and he’s been using it nonstop. I took away the earbuds so he’s only using the attached speaker. Audio quality is so-so and volume is not-too-loud. The interface is a little bad but he’s never used an iPhone so he’s figuring it out  Album art apparently only displays if embedded in the audio file - it doesn\'t find the folder.jpg files that I have everywhere. When he wants, he can use the headphone jack to plug it into a larger speaker and it’s a perfectly good audio source.

Recommended.