I’m the audience for this. I’ve bought previous android portable standalone players and it being a phone is actually a negative.
There are already plenty of good smartphone dacs so there’s no need to make a super high end battery chugging, chunky phone for a niche audience, when most people are just going to use Bluetooth headsets anyway and have a good experience doing so.
Im not just carrying these things around like a phone because the types of headphones I’ve run with these devices are not the type that I would bring with me on a bus or to the store. Portability really doesn’t matter to the target audience of these.
I pull my standalone player out when I want to sit in front of my my garden and listen to an album all the way through. Getting a call or a notification would kill that for me.