Apple iPod Shuffle 3rd Generation Black (2 GB) MP3 Player
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- Number of Songs: 500
- Usage: Music
- Interface: USB 2.0
- Main Storage Type: Built-in Memory
- Storage Capacity: 2 GB
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Apple's 3rd-generation iPod Shuffle: What were they thinking?
Pros
Small. VoiceOver software. Music can be sorted into playlists.
Cons
Control buttons on earphone cord. iTunes still awkward and lacking obvious features.
Recommended it?
Yes
The Bottom Line:
In its third release of the iPod Shuffle, Apple added some great features: playlists and voice readout of titles. But it botched the UI.
By moving its control buttons to the headphone cord, Apple was able to reduce the size of its third-generation iPod Shuffle to approximately that of a disposable lighter: 45.2 mm long by 17.5 mm wide by 7.8 mm deep including an integral clip, and 10.7 grams in mass. Even though it has no display, this is still quite a feat of miniaturization--leaving it half the volume and 2/3 of the mass of the second-generation iPod Shuffle--especially considering the device's ten-hour battery life.
This is perhaps the point where iPods get too small. Having such a small size and about the same mass as a half-dollar coin, the 3rd-generation Shuffle can get lost in a bag or pocket. More importantly, moving the controls to the earphone cord means that one needs to spend an additional $20 on an adapter such as the Scosche tapLINE to use high-quality headphones, small speakers, or anything that doesn't have the uncomfortable feel and tinny sound of earphones. The tapLINE has the additional advantage of moving the controls to the base of the cord; the Apple earphones place them high up on the cord, roughly level with a user's neck, a very inconvenient height while in motion. Would Apple have been willing to move away from their signature "wheel" configuration they probably could have put control buttons on the body of the iPod Shuffle; this is not the first time they sacrificed substance for style. It's also not surprising from a company still dedicated to the one-button mouse despite the consumer-driven adoption of three buttons and a wheel on every other platform.
Apple does make use of a single button on the Shuffle more than its mouse's pathetic single button. Controlling the iPod Shuffle is a bit like Morse code. The upper and lower buttons on the controls merely change the volume; moving between files and playlists is all done by pressing, holding, or multi-pressing the center button. It doesn't take too long to learn the patterns, but they are nowhere close to intuitive.
Previous models of iPod Shuffle had no display and no means to indicating the device's state except for LED blinkenlights. Fortunately for the end-user Apple didn't give the iPod Shuffle a Captain Pike-like minimal output to rival its one-button input. Instead, a version of the Macintosh's VoiceOver software is available. It isn't installed at the factory, and it takes up about 10% of the roughly 1.8 GB of storage on the device. (2 GB is an overstatement as is customary for hard drives and MP3 playersl--instead of 1024 MB in a GB, 1024 KB in an MB, and 1024 bytes in a KB, they slipped 1000s into the calculation.) But it's well worth it, as it enables the third generation iPod Shuffle to read song names and playlist names from the database created on the device by iTunes. It can actually do this in several different languages, including, surprisingly enough, Chinese. Playlist names are usually Anglicized, but sometimes it's a bit too smart with file names. "Piano Sonata" brings out the iPod Shuffle's Italian, my taste in classical music means I hear a lot of French, and nearly everything on the very New Orleanean Los Hombres Calientes album was read in very clear Spanish. Curiously enough, the different languages have different voices; English is similar to the telephone talking clock, but Spanish is a somewhere between a high baritone and a low tenor.
Ability to organize audio recordings into playlists is the other great improvement over the 2nd generation iPod Shuffle and perhaps the primary reason to spend the extra $5-$10 on the 3rd gen. model. iTunes automatically organizes music into playlists by genre and the user can create any playlist desired, enabling use of the iPod Shuffle to listen to albums, foreign language instruction, full symphonies, and similar multi-track or multi-file programming. iTunes will sort music by albums for its own purposes, but doesn't automatically create album playlists, leaving an extra step that is well worth it.
The iPod Shuffle can be treated as a vfat USB flash drive, but using VoiceOver and keeping things organized requires maintenance of a database on the device (other than the partition table) containing file titles and playlist data. A few third-party programs are available to do this (mainly to compensate for Apple's ridiculously poor support for the Linux/X platform) but Windows and Mac users--and those of us new to iPods--will likely find themselves using iTunes. There are many things iTunes doesn't do. It doesn't automatically create album playlists. It will convert higher-sampling-rate music files to 128 kbps AAC (allowing 300-400 CD tracks to be stored for playback) on transfer to the iPod, but doesn't give the option of file-by-file selection. It's either all or nothing; one cannot choose to compress the White Stripes but leave a Telarc classical recording losslessly encoded. (Unlike earlier models, lossless encoding is supported on the iPod Shuffle.) Music is copied from CD to the hard drive efficiently, but occasional glitches (probably due to underrun) are introduced and not corrected. And the iTunes user interface has Apple's visual slickness but, like the 3rd gen. iPod Shuffle, some usability problems. Not only are many options that should be there not there, but many of the playback controls are buried in a "preferences" menu, and the syncing of only some playlists/albums to the iPod is done by a time-consuming drag-and-drop rather than checkboxes.
The simplicity of its design may have an added benefit, or it may be unrelated: the iPod Shuffle is remarkably durable. I haven't run it over with the car, nor put it in the oven, but have subjected mine (accidentally) to mechanical shocks and temperature extremes and it still works reliably. It feels like a solid piece of equipment--the housing doesn't flex at all and nothing rattles--and can work even after exposure to extreme conditions. A car in Arizona left in the sun with the windows up can get hot enough to melt soap and heat-shrink plastic bottles, but these temperature changes do not seem to cause stress fractures or other problems in the iPod Shuffle's circuit board and ICs. Heat it up--to temperatures that cause engine code readers and other devices with displays to at least temporarily fail--cool it down, and it still works.
On net, the 3rd generation iPod Shuffle was an improvement over its predecessors; addition of playlists, VoiceOver output, and support for lossless encoding to such an affordable MP3/digital music player balances out the weirdness of the user interface and the true pain-in-the-neck that is iTunes. The recently announced 4th generation model keeps all of these features but moves the controls back to the body. When it reaches price parity with the 3rd gen. models it's certainly the better buy, but until then the 3rd. gen iPod Shuffle is competitive both against the 2nd generation model and competitors' offerings at its price point.
This is perhaps the point where iPods get too small. Having such a small size and about the same mass as a half-dollar coin, the 3rd-generation Shuffle can get lost in a bag or pocket. More importantly, moving the controls to the earphone cord means that one needs to spend an additional $20 on an adapter such as the Scosche tapLINE to use high-quality headphones, small speakers, or anything that doesn't have the uncomfortable feel and tinny sound of earphones. The tapLINE has the additional advantage of moving the controls to the base of the cord; the Apple earphones place them high up on the cord, roughly level with a user's neck, a very inconvenient height while in motion. Would Apple have been willing to move away from their signature "wheel" configuration they probably could have put control buttons on the body of the iPod Shuffle; this is not the first time they sacrificed substance for style. It's also not surprising from a company still dedicated to the one-button mouse despite the consumer-driven adoption of three buttons and a wheel on every other platform.
Apple does make use of a single button on the Shuffle more than its mouse's pathetic single button. Controlling the iPod Shuffle is a bit like Morse code. The upper and lower buttons on the controls merely change the volume; moving between files and playlists is all done by pressing, holding, or multi-pressing the center button. It doesn't take too long to learn the patterns, but they are nowhere close to intuitive.
Previous models of iPod Shuffle had no display and no means to indicating the device's state except for LED blinkenlights. Fortunately for the end-user Apple didn't give the iPod Shuffle a Captain Pike-like minimal output to rival its one-button input. Instead, a version of the Macintosh's VoiceOver software is available. It isn't installed at the factory, and it takes up about 10% of the roughly 1.8 GB of storage on the device. (2 GB is an overstatement as is customary for hard drives and MP3 playersl--instead of 1024 MB in a GB, 1024 KB in an MB, and 1024 bytes in a KB, they slipped 1000s into the calculation.) But it's well worth it, as it enables the third generation iPod Shuffle to read song names and playlist names from the database created on the device by iTunes. It can actually do this in several different languages, including, surprisingly enough, Chinese. Playlist names are usually Anglicized, but sometimes it's a bit too smart with file names. "Piano Sonata" brings out the iPod Shuffle's Italian, my taste in classical music means I hear a lot of French, and nearly everything on the very New Orleanean Los Hombres Calientes album was read in very clear Spanish. Curiously enough, the different languages have different voices; English is similar to the telephone talking clock, but Spanish is a somewhere between a high baritone and a low tenor.
Ability to organize audio recordings into playlists is the other great improvement over the 2nd generation iPod Shuffle and perhaps the primary reason to spend the extra $5-$10 on the 3rd gen. model. iTunes automatically organizes music into playlists by genre and the user can create any playlist desired, enabling use of the iPod Shuffle to listen to albums, foreign language instruction, full symphonies, and similar multi-track or multi-file programming. iTunes will sort music by albums for its own purposes, but doesn't automatically create album playlists, leaving an extra step that is well worth it.
The iPod Shuffle can be treated as a vfat USB flash drive, but using VoiceOver and keeping things organized requires maintenance of a database on the device (other than the partition table) containing file titles and playlist data. A few third-party programs are available to do this (mainly to compensate for Apple's ridiculously poor support for the Linux/X platform) but Windows and Mac users--and those of us new to iPods--will likely find themselves using iTunes. There are many things iTunes doesn't do. It doesn't automatically create album playlists. It will convert higher-sampling-rate music files to 128 kbps AAC (allowing 300-400 CD tracks to be stored for playback) on transfer to the iPod, but doesn't give the option of file-by-file selection. It's either all or nothing; one cannot choose to compress the White Stripes but leave a Telarc classical recording losslessly encoded. (Unlike earlier models, lossless encoding is supported on the iPod Shuffle.) Music is copied from CD to the hard drive efficiently, but occasional glitches (probably due to underrun) are introduced and not corrected. And the iTunes user interface has Apple's visual slickness but, like the 3rd gen. iPod Shuffle, some usability problems. Not only are many options that should be there not there, but many of the playback controls are buried in a "preferences" menu, and the syncing of only some playlists/albums to the iPod is done by a time-consuming drag-and-drop rather than checkboxes.
The simplicity of its design may have an added benefit, or it may be unrelated: the iPod Shuffle is remarkably durable. I haven't run it over with the car, nor put it in the oven, but have subjected mine (accidentally) to mechanical shocks and temperature extremes and it still works reliably. It feels like a solid piece of equipment--the housing doesn't flex at all and nothing rattles--and can work even after exposure to extreme conditions. A car in Arizona left in the sun with the windows up can get hot enough to melt soap and heat-shrink plastic bottles, but these temperature changes do not seem to cause stress fractures or other problems in the iPod Shuffle's circuit board and ICs. Heat it up--to temperatures that cause engine code readers and other devices with displays to at least temporarily fail--cool it down, and it still works.
On net, the 3rd generation iPod Shuffle was an improvement over its predecessors; addition of playlists, VoiceOver output, and support for lossless encoding to such an affordable MP3/digital music player balances out the weirdness of the user interface and the true pain-in-the-neck that is iTunes. The recently announced 4th generation model keeps all of these features but moves the controls back to the body. When it reaches price parity with the 3rd gen. models it's certainly the better buy, but until then the 3rd. gen iPod Shuffle is competitive both against the 2nd generation model and competitors' offerings at its price point.
