The new iPod Shuffle was sneakily released today, apparently, and it looks like the most innovative Shuffle yet! Half the size of the already tiny Shuffle, because they moved the controls to the headphone cord, and it speaks to you, which lets it support playlists without the GUI of the typical iPod (hold a button down and it starts reading your playlist names to you, letting you select which one you want). Check it: Apple - iPod shuffle - The first mp3 player that talks to you I'm consistently impressed with Apple's innovation.
The playlist option and additional GBs are definitely nice additions. I don't like that the controls are now tied to the headphones though. That forces you to use the earbuds and makes it more expensive and harder to replace them if they're lost/broken.
Interesting. I'm still using an absolute dinosaur, the original 512 mb shuffle, after 4 years without problems. It will still play 12+ hours on a charge and holds 150 - 200 songs. Pros and Cons of the new shuffle as I see it: Pros: More memory for more songs Playlists Cons: How easy will it be to find the control when running Can't use my current noise-canceling headphones Battery Life: My shuffle was rated for 12 hours, the new one is only 10 I personally think the Ipod Nano is the sweat spot of features vs price. If my shuffle ever quits I'll look into getting one. My wife has a Mini but the battery is gone. It only will play for 1-2 hours per charge so it spends most of the time docked to a home speaker set.
Proprietary earbuds, 80$ pricetag for only 4G. Having to convert your MP3's through iTunes. Rather expensive gadget fwiw, I rather a generic mp3 player that also doubles as a thumbdrive, plays MP3 natively, has 4G and nearly half the cost.
I actually think the controls would be very easy to find when running: you just run your hand up the headphone cord. It certainly is a notable limitation about the inability to use different headphones. The other thing I wonder about is the lack of intuitiveness of only having three buttons to do everything. It looks like Apple kept things simple, but you couldn't pick one up and play your music without minimal instruction. Also, I assume you couldn't plug it into your car stereo and be able to control it.
The Shuffle plays MP3's, you just organize them and manage playlists and syncing through iTunes. I'd rather do that than manually copy files. I believe it also has the ability to be used as a flash drive (though you need a cord), though I think .MP3 players are a poor solution for such uses when a bona fide flash drive costs $10 and fits on your key chain. Whether or not you prefer Apple, well, to each his own, but I personally think their quality justifies the the price difference over their competitors. I think that's why Apple has something like 90% market share for .MP3 players.
Apple will let other companies make headphones, and will made an adapter for people to use existing headphones.
I have to laugh at the "only 4G" comment. 4G is 1000 songs. That is far more capacity then I would ever use since I've been happily managing with only 1/8th of that capacity. It seems that with electronics we have come to the point where we have more simply for the sake of having more. Computer hard drives have got so larger years ago that few would ever fill one up but they keep getting bigger and bigger every 3 months.
I'm with you as far as the music goes, but where extra space really starts coming into play is for video. My 16 GB iPhone is full after only a few movies and TV shows (SD content from iTunes, no less), and I have a 1 TB hard drive which I anticipate outgrowing before too long (it's grown 500 GB in the past year). I plan on getting some scalable network storage to hold all my video soon.
I just watched the video tour. Here's what I expected to see: Here's what it sounds like if you sync with a Mac: <sweet voice> Hanna's Playlist Here's what it sounds like if you sync with a PC: <crackling> Windows has detected an irreperable error and has shut down to prevent harm.
I'm still happy with mi iPod mini. And if I cannot use my noise-canceling headset I would never consider switching. But then, I have no reason to switch anyway.
