Audience of One

iPod Shuffle

I recently bought an iPod Shuffle for many reasons, but mainly because my CD player had broken and I wanted a way of listening to music while away from the house. My memory stick had also broken (or rather, it doesn’t work at school so it might as well be – I still haven’t tested it elsewhere) and I wanted a replacement. When the iPod Shuffle was announced, I realised I could kill two birds with one stone – so I did.

The Shuffle is everything Apple advertises it as. It’s small and lightweight, and its battery life is actually quite impressive (I still haven’t had to charge mine a second time and I’ve been using it for almost three weeks constantly). It doubles as a memory stick that works perfectly, and of course it interfaces with iTunes, the discerning user’s media player.

There isn’t much to be said that hasn’t been said elsewhere other than it almost perfectly fits my needs. The Shuffle doesn’t have a screen, something which would have been quite useful, but for the most part I don’t need one. The only issue is when you have ten or so albums stored on it and you want to find a particular song… you have to do a lot of skipping, especially if you can’t remember which order your albums are in.

Current iPod owners might be interested in having it as a flash-memory alternative (for use while at the gym or something, where a hard-disk-based player might not be ideal) as it will use their current music library. If you use iTunes and AAC compression then you probably won’t find much better. If you don’t use AAC though, there are many other portable players which will probably do you just as well.

The iPod and iPod mini are both examples of innovative technology; but while the iPod Shuffle looks stylish, the innovation is slightly lacking.

Matthew @ 16:05, March 8, 2005 to Reviews | Comments (4)