The new iPod Shuffle reviewed
A brand-new Apple iPod Shuffle arrived in the post for me yesterday, absolutely gratis. Didn’t I feel clever when I couldn’t find a way to open the box for over half an hour…
My Audible account came up for renewal last week. It was touch-and-go whether I would resubscribe, more go than touch, for a while. Regular readers might well recall me writing that for a time I couldn’t download audiobooks from the site, or get answers to emails, or speak to a real person. Profuse apologies, some explanation of technical changes that had been going on, and – the most important thing – speedy rectification of the issues went a long way towards making me think it was worth sticking with them.
When I first signed up, the iPod Shuffle wasn’t on offer unless I took out a different subscription to the one I wanted and then it was the original Shuffle, which looks very similar to those USB hard drives – you know, the ones that look like little bullets? Only the Shuffle was a much bigger bullet. This time round, I was able to get one of these babies with my subscription and the new Shuffle is very different in appearance from the original.
Hold up your thumb, assuming you’re an adult – and if not, you shouldn’t in all likelihood be reading this site, note the voluntary parental advisory badge in the bottom bar – and you’ve got the width of the new Shuffle in front of you. Now follow down from the tip of your thumb to just below the knuckle thereon. And that’s the size of the thing, just a little bigger than those special-edition postage stamps that get issued around the holiday season (as opposed to the usual Queen’s head stamps, which are a little bit larger than a thumbnail).
The new iPod Shuffle is an incredibly tiny device, comes with 1Gb of internal flash memory and costs £55 to buy in the UK. All I had to pay was the postage, and of course I pay a reasonable amount each month – £14 – for my Audible subscription. It’s good value when you consider you get an entitlement to download two books a month for that outlay, and they can cost anywhere between £7 and £60 to buy individually. There are no restrictions on the books you can get as part of your subscription, so one month I might get two worth £15 or I might get two that are closer to £100. The price of the audiobooks relates to their running time more or less, some lasting two hours and others twenty-seven or more. If you’re in the mood for epics and have time to listen to them, this means substantial savings if you’re already a fan of audiobooks.
Back to the iPod Shuffle. It comes in a tough perspex box which is rectangular and has nothing to do with the functionality of the mp3 player. Like all Apple packaging, it’s just there to look cool. The problem was, I could see no latch, no hinge to open the box. I felt so stupid trying for over half an hour to figure it out. I felt kinship with our distant ancestors trying to work out fire. There was a tiny sticker on one end of the box with a circular arrow going anti-clockwise, which I guessed was supposed to tell me how to open the damn thing but I didn’t find it remotely helpful. I resorted to trying to prise the box open with a kitchen knife to no avail. When I finally got the thing open, the sticker still seemed to have no bearing on the how-to.
So, how to open the box. Well if you get a rectangular box, I believe it’s almost instinctive to attempt to open it horizontally. You don’t where the Shuffle is concerned. You open it the other way. Can’t picture that? Okay. A coffin. You know how those open right? Well imagine finding the hinge mechanism opens from the feet of the deceased up to the head. Got it now? Stupid, completely counter-intuitive and very frustrating. That said, I was laughing out loud. I couldn’t believe I was struggling for so long.
With my hands finally on my new toy, I set about discovering how to set it up and what it could do. A big drawback for me compared to the original Shuffle is that the new one requires a tiny dock plugged into a USB port, into which you plug the Shuffle. I just don’t like docks, for anything. The earphone socket doubles as the interface for loading music and charging the player.
Clearly, the reason for this change is to allow less hardware requirements inside the Shuffle but it takes away some of the on-the-go functionality of the original. If you use it to store data files as well as music, you have to carry the dock on your person with you at all times. I don’t intend to use the Shuffle for anything but music and audiobooks but there may be times when I’m away from home for longer than the remarkable 12-hour battery life. There are already Apple and third-party solutions to this problem but, of course, they come at an additional and sometimes hefty price.
The battery charges up while in the dock. The power status is indicated by a tiny light on the player. Just like traffic lights, green means good to go, amber means your power is low, red means the Shuffle is about to die on you until you get it back into its dock. The click-wheel interface is immediately familiar to users of other iPods, there’s an on/off switch and one that allows you to choose between shuffling your tracks at random or playing them in order.
The new iPod Shuffle looks to be the most durable player Apple has released to date, coming with a funky aluminium case which doesn’t immediately have you seeking out silicon skins to avoid scratches, unlike the classic iPod design which is utterly impractical when facing the rigours of daily use.
You fill the device by interfacing it with the ubiquitous iTunes and can choose to load it up from playlists you’ve created or from your entire library. For my test-run – which turned out to be a 15-mile walk (don’t ask, it wasn’t all intentional) – I chose my ‘300 most-played’ playlist. As soon as the Shuffle was connected to iTunes, the interface notified me that there was a software update and so I installed that before any music.
Now, here’s something cool and frustrating in equal measure, much like the packaging. You can tell the Shuffle to convert your audio files to a lower bit rate, meaning you can fit more on it. The original files on your hard drive are unaffected, and sound quality is still good, so I went ahead with this. If you do, it takes a very long time to load up the player. I found it took over an hour, which is a bit ridiculous. I’m assuming it takes minutes, just like standard iPods, if you don’t choose to downgrade the file sizes to fit more on.
The Shuffle chose an eclectic mix of tracks and was eventually fully loaded and ready to go. The back of the device is a robust clip, and I attached this to the tiny change pocket in my jeans. I had no worries about it coming undone. The device is so small, and so light, you think you might lose it until you think again. If you lose it, you’ll know. How? Well the music will stop playing through your headphones. Duh.
Because of the size, there’s no screen and no EQ options available. Just like the original Shuffle. There’s no necessity for a screen, but the ability to fix the EQ at least when the device is attached to the computer would have been nice. The sound had a little less bass to it than I usually like, but I can live with that because the player is a much more convenient and useful option when out and about in the countryside than its chunkier relatives.
I didn’t get the hissing some users have reported but I did notice some tracks – just two or three out of the hundred plus I played while out on my walk – snapped, crackled and popped like the famous cereal. These were not ripped from vinyl, so I’ve no idea what was going on there but I’m going to quite literally keep an ear out for it happening more often and if it becomes a problem, it’s going back to Apple for repair or replacement. But I don’t think there’s anything wrong as such. It may be that there are some limitations to be found in using flash memory instead of a hard drive.
Unlike other EU-released iPods, the Shuffle’s volume range was acceptable to my ears. The EU imposes a volume limiter on iPods, the US and other countries don’t. I don’t like my music loud unless in a club or at a party, but the nanny factor really gets to me and so I use a free piece of software called gopod to circumnavigate the barrier of the bureaucrats. It doesn’t work with the Shuffle – at least not yet – but I found the volume could be raised quite high enough for my liking, thank you. I can’t say the same about other iPods sold in the EU.
If I’m away from home a long time, I will stick to using my iPod Photo, with its 40Gb hard drive and colour screen to display album artwork. That said, it only has five hours of battery life, tops. The new iPod Shuffle is definitely going to be used a lot more when exploring the woods around my home or when popping into town. It’s easy to hide away, no burden to carry around, and less likely to fall to its doom when crossing rocky countryside terrain.
Of course you don’t need to be sporty or the outdoor type to drop an iPod: running for the bus can result in one of those slow-motion horror moments, when you see kit worth hundreds of pounds taking off like a baby bird. I won’t say this can never happen with the new iPod Shuffle but it’s very unlikely if you’ve clipped it on firmly somewhere that makes sense (and I don’t think the photo above shows a sensible place for it – not unless your goal is to guarantee a mugging).
The iPod Shuffle can interface with car or in-home stereos, just the same as any other iPod, if you get the appropriate adapters, FM transmitters or cassette converters. And I’m sure many third-party add-ons, not necessary but fun if you can afford them, will be released over time.
If you’ve never owned an iPod but want one, the new iPod Shuffle is recommended especially if you live an active lifestyle. And only you can really say whether you do, or don’t. You can lie if you want to. Most of us would never know…
RIPA NOTICE: NO CONSENT IS GIVEN FOR INTERCEPTION OF PAGE TRANSMISSION