iPod Fans

Earlier this month Apple dropped the price of its smallest flash memory player to just £32. Wow! It also bumped its capacity to 2GB (around 500 songs in 128Kbps AAC format) and charges just £45 for the pleasure (1GB model still available). So I thought now was as good a time as any to get one in for review and see what I’ve been missing.

The immensely popular iPod Shuffle is a sight to believe - it’s just half a cubic inch in volume, weighs an unnoticeable 14g, features a minimalistic aluminium design with a built-in clip and comes in five metallic colours - silver, blue, green, purple and a (PRODUCT) RED special edition. There simply isn’t anything else on the market that’s as portable or as hard wearing.

The iPod Shuffle is also the world’s most wearable iPod - just take a look around the next time you’re in the gym! Now let’s not get carried away - the iPod Shuffle’s features list is almost non-existent and you have to use iTunes to get your music onto in. On the plus side there’s a vast ecosystem of accessories with over 4000 products made specifically for the iPod including cases, fitness accessories, and speaker systems. It should work with a lot of modern automobile stereo systems, too.

There’s no display on the iPod Shuffle, so it’s not great for discovering new artists, but using it is a snap. Tactile controls on the front let you alter volume levels and skip tracks, and there’s a dedicated on/off switch and shuffle switch - the latter either randomly mixes up the song order or resets back to the order in which the tracks were synced from iTunes. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the player actually outperformed Apple’s 12-hour battery life rating, and not by just a few minutes, but a few hours - I managed to get 15 hours!

The iPod Shuffle requires a Mac with a USB 2.0 port, Mac OS X 10.4.8 or later and iTunes 7.4; or a Windows PC with a USB 2.0 port and Windows Vista or Windows XP Home or Professional (Service Pack 2) or later and iTunes 7.4 or later (not supplied). The headphone jack doubles as a dock connector - simply flip the player upside-down and drop it into the included dock.

The iPod Shuffle isn’t about features or sound quality - it epitomises ease of use, portability and convenience. It’s time to join the revolution! [8]