Good player for the money.

I've had my iPod Shuffle for about a week now. I'm pleased, especially since I received it free with my credit card account (you've seen the ads).

The Good

Extremely easy to use and load with tons of music. This tiny itsey-bitsey little player holds about 8-9 hours of music and I can get about that much time from the battery .. even though I'm using rather large Sony MDR-V150 headphones. The included earbuds are not my style. I'd describe the player as slightly larger than a 5 stick pack of Juicey Fruit gum. Amazing. The front of the unit has your basic audio controls with a layout now famous for its simple design. The center button (inside the outer ring) is play and pause. The ring left and right are back and forward to each track. To ff and rewind simply press and hold the ring location instead of clicking it. The top and bottom of the ring are volume control. The indicator LEDs glow through the translucent case. Very nice.

The back of the player has two controls. A slider for 'off', 'on play tracks sequentially', and 'on play tracks randomly'. Very easy to use. And there is a battery status check button. Click it to find out if your battery is fully charged (green LED), partially charged (yellow LED), or needs charging (red LED).

The bottom of the unit has a simple cap which you can exchange for the included cap and lanyard. The cap covers a male USB connector which is used to both connect the unit to a computer for loading music from software (ideally iTunes for Mac or PC) and charging the unit if you're connecting it to a high-power USB port. What's a high-power USB port? It's not necessarily a USB 2.0 high-speed port. Read The Bad.

Sound quality .. awesome. iTunes software makes loading and organizing music very simple. Nuf said.

The Bad

The slider on the back doesn't really click into position, so selecting the 'on play tracks sequentially' position can be difficult to find without actually looking at the switch. Not really so much a problem as it is a minor annoyance.

The Shuffle connects for loading music AND charges via a male USB connector on the bottom of the unit. This is sweet, but the Shuffle is just a millimeter too wide to connect to the high-power side USB ports on the side of the Apple eMac. Designed on purpose? Possibly. You cannot use the low-power USB connector on the eMac keyboard for charging so your only options are to get Apple's Shuffle dock or a USB cable extension to connect to the eMac's high-power USB side ports. Another annoyance.

The downright Ugly

I could not get my relatively new Dell 8300 that runs clean and smooth to see the iPod Shuffle after loading the included software, or after unloading the software, or after downloading updated software from the Apple website, or after resetting the Shuffle, on ANY of the 8300's USB ports. No hope whatsoever for access from the PC. Fortunately I also have an eMac (the one that won't allow me to connect the Shuffle to ANY of it's high-power USB side ports). So I can load music from the eMac (and this works GREAT) but until I get a USB extension I have to charge it on my PC ports. VERY UGLY.

Peeve #2. Unlike many MP3 players on the market, Apple apparently has not figured out how to remove the gap between audio tracks. That's right, no gapless playback. Well, the support folks do tell you that you can merge the entire album into one massive track and you won't hear any gaps, but then there is no way to shuffle between tracks. Yep, just one massive audio track with no gaps but also no control. This seriously sucks for live albums as the gap is a very noticeable 1 to 2 seconds long. Completely unacceptable for an audio lover, especially considering the otherwise excellent audio quality. VERY UGLY.