Apple iPod Shuffle 2nd Generation Orange (1 GB) MP3 Player

For the longest time I had resisted getting an iPod. Why, I thought to myself, do I need one? At home or at work, I have my computer to play MP3's, in my car I have my MP3 playing stereo - am I so sad that need to be surrounded by music at all times? Do I really have to rock out at the grocery store THAT badly?

And then I won an iPod shuffle at work. Then I signed on to a fitness club. And then I started traveling by plane a whole lot more, and suddenly I found myself using an iPod a whole bunch!

Since my last portable music device was a Sony walkman back in 1991, I cant compare the shuffle to other models of the iPod or other MP3 players on the market, so don't expect a whole lot of compare and contrast in this review.

That said - what an impressive piece of technology. The first thing I noticed was not the size - although it is damn tiny - but the quality. Not plastic at all, but feeling more like a real solid chunk of metal in your hand. The brushed aluminum shell has a slightly rough textured feel - and comes in several different colors. I got the orange, but there's a gunmetal gray, red, green, purple and a teal (and perhaps more). The buttons, tiny though they may be, feel solid and not cheap.

After doing some research, the Shuffle is a flash based player - meaning solid state and no moving parts at all, unlike the rest of the line which run on mini hard drives. In theory this means that the Shuffle should be pretty durable - not that I'm dropping mine out a window to test this for you or anything. But the fewer the moving parts, the less points of failure there are. Being all solid state like that also means that Apple can make the Shuffle tiny.

How tiny? So small that it's about the size of the screen of the Nano (I compared it against my friends iPod). It's very light weight, easily clipping onto a shirt collar (via the attached clip on the back) and you'll never notice it was there. The times when it did slip out of my hands, the shuffle didn't even fall to the ground because it was so light that it just hung from the end of the earphone cord.

THE LAYOUT AND DISPLAY -
This size does come at a price. The control layout, while similar to other iPods and their multifunction scroll wheel, it doesn't actually scroll. Pressing on the top or bottom of the "wheel" adjusts the volume respectively while pressing on the right or left skips forward or backward, and pressing directly in the middle will toggle pause or play. And of course there's no display screen.

No screen means no way to talk to you. It doesn't display song names, there's no video playback and there's no cute games like Tetris available to you. To me, none of these things are a big deal - I probably know what's on my Shuffle already, if I'm going to watch a movie it wont be on a 1 inch by 1 inch screen and I have my DS for games. The one thing that does bug me is that the iPod has no way to talk to me. You have to decipher the flashes of a lone LED on the top when you want to know the battery life remaining.

There's a guide to the status light patterns in the instructions, but I was never very good at deciphering Morse code when I was a boy Scout, so I have no hope of trying to remember the patterns and colors that tell me how much battery life the Shuffle has left. In addition, the LED colors are so close to each other - amber, green, and occasionally red - that it takes a discerning eye to tell them apart. Those with bad eyes or partial colorblindness need not apply.

LENGTH OF PLAY -
So how about that battery life, anyway? Considering that companies often vastly overestimate the battery life of their toys, I was shocked to find that the shuffle actually outperformed Apple's 12 hour estimated battery life - and not just by a little bit, mind you - but by several hours. Setting my Shuffle to an average listening volume, I set it going in the morning and let it go for about 12 and a half hours straight before giving up for the day. The next morning, the battery finally gave up on me after about 15 hours of playtime. If anything, I'm going to run out of music before I run out of juice.

FILE CAPACITY -
Oh yeah - so how much does the Shuffle hold? This of course depends on the bitrate that you ripped your CD collection at, but on an average I can get roughly 250 of my eighties pop songs with only a few megs of free space left to go. A rough estimation is that I can cram about 14 hours of music on my Shuffle.

HOW'S IT SOUND?
As far as sound quality goes, the shuffle seems as good as my old Sony Walkman. The physical size of the shuffle doesn't do anything to limit the size of the sound it can produce and I found it was quite possible to go beyond pleasant listening volumes with the included earbuds. The earbuds that came with the Shuffle were sufficient but cheap. I had them die on my during my trip to Germany, doing that "you turned up the music too loud" blown out sound, even though I never cranked my Shuffle up that far. So if you're adamant about getting the most out of your audio player, you'll most certainly want to upgrade and get some nice headphones (which you probably would have done anyway).

CONNECTIVITY -
Great - so how about computer connectivity? Unlike the other models of the line, the Shuffle uses the onboard 3.5mm stereo headphone minijack for everything - audio, power and charging, and syncing with iTunes. It doesn't have the usual iPod interface that the other models sport. Unfortunately that means that the "universal" iPod Connector/Dock that lets you plug into an alarm clock or your car dashboard port is no longer universal. Instead the shuffle comes with its very own dock, a device on a cord that's nearly as big as the shuffle itself. The end terminates in a USB plug and the bottom is rubberized, to prevent the unit from slipping, necessary due to its small size and (lack of) weight.

Before you start using your shuffle, you'll need to get some songs on it with Apple's iTunes. It's not included, so you'll need to make sure you have an internet connection and plenty of time to download the software. Since I find iTunes to be bloated and unnecessarily complicated, I use Media Monkey myself - a much more elegant program. But the long and the short is that you'll need to spend some prep time first before you can start rocking out with Journey or Styx or whomever.

THE BOTTOM LINE
For roughly 80 bucks, it's really hard to go wrong here. If you can get over the lack of a screen (I did with ease) and just need a quick and dirty unit for working out or short jaunts around the block (like I do), or just want an inexpensive way into the MP3 playing revolution, then the Shuffle is just the ticket for you.