iPod shuffle one-day impressions

[prog]

I bought a 512MB iPod shuffle yesterday. I got the smallest capacity available since it's still enough to hold far more music than I'll listen to between any two visits to my home Mac.

It has negligible weight, and small enough that I think nothing of putting it in my shirt pocket. The buttons are satisfyingly solid and have nice tactile feedback despite their teensy-weensiness, and they look nice too. Once again I wish that something like Bluetooth earphones were possible; the long cord bouncing everywhere is the only thing I don't like about the Shuffle's form factor.

The function-selection switch sucks. There's no place to grip it, and it's hard to change its position without accidentally pressing the control buttons located on the Shuffle's opposite side. Furthermore, it has very little tactile feedback, so it's hard to tell when I have the middle position (non-shuffled play) selected, or if i wedged it into some meaningless in-between place. On the other hand, I find myself using the switch very little, since the Shuffle (like all other iPods, question mark) has an auto-shutoff feature, and I don't expect to change playback modes very often.

Interestingly, I find myself keeping the thing in non-shuffled playback mode, since iTunes seems to fill the Shuffle with randomly ordered songs to begin with, and I come across completely unknown music often enough that I want to see the ordered playlist the next time I plug my Shuffle into my Mac so I can figure out what the heck that song was.

Comments

[jtroutman.livejournal.com]

I got the 1GB model last week. It is nice to have something to listen to in the car.

I agree on the mode-switch -- it needs just a little bit of grip to it.

[daerr.livejournal.com]

Yeah, if you pause a regular iPod then it'll turn itself off automatically.