From the runt of the litter, to the spoilt youngest child, the little tie clip-shaped Shuffle has a party trick that none of its popular siblings can manage. It can talk. Yes, it's the World’s smallest MP3 player with an impeccable lineage, but it’s the power of speech that separates the 3rd generation Shuffle from every other music player.
Gimmick? Well, he’s not the most engaging conversationalist, but the all-talking, all-dancing Shuffle will "speak" track info and battery life to you at the press of a button on the headphone lead, with a new feature called VoiceOver. Stan Ng, product manager at Apple, told TechReviews that this neatly removes the need for an energy-heavy LCD screen, and gives the user up to 10 hours of music playback - a feat we tested on a long train ride over the weekend.
It also means you can hear other menu options and cycle through them with ease. Continue squeezing the headphone lead and it will read out all of your playlists, removing the pressure on the lead and the playlist you selected will begin playing. "This removes the need for a lot of untidy buttons too" Ng told TechReviews, reinforcing yet again Apple’s design philosophy.
One point of contention we have with the VoiceOver feature is that the voice varies depending on whether you sync the Shuffle to a Mac or PC. The Mac voice is fairly acceptable for an electronic voice, however the PC voice makes us cringe with embarrassment. When we asked Ng about the difference between the two, he simply chuckled and said the PC voice is Microsoft's standard auto-generated voice, and nothing to do with Apple.
All you’ll find on the little fellow itself besides the Shuffle switch and the smallest LED light we’ve ever seen is a headphone jack that will accept any regular 3mm plug. Here's the catch however - due to the lack of buttons on the Shuffle's body, you're locked into using Apple's supplied headphones (or their pricier buds). Anyone who owns a pair of headphones that doesn't contain a function paddle on the lead will discover they can't actually control the music - can't adjust the volume, nor skip songs or change playlists. They certainly won't be able to activate the VoiceOver function.
This is where the main fault with the Shuffle lies. The bundled headphones are the cheap Apple buds which never sit quite right in your ear, and until Apple introduces an adapter, you won't be able to use your favourite Sennheiser/Bose headphones. Consider it like DRM, but in hardware form. It won't be long until the third-party Apple ecosystem springs into action however, with Ng telling us "look out for third party headphones and adapters heading this way, I've already seen the Klipsch headphones with Shuffle control, and there will be more" Even if there are, they'll need permission from Apple to bring them to market.
Having said that, we're of the opinion that anyone who chooses to spring £59.99 on an iPod Shuffle won't care too much about audio quality nor whether they can use their other brand of 'phones. Anyone who owns better quality headphones than those supplied by Apple aren't very likely to choose a Shuffle over a Nano or more expensive iPod.
The size may have halved, but somehow the iPod Shuffle's capacity has doubled to 4GB and the sound quality remains remarkably precise and potent. What next for the all-singing, all-dancing iPod? Voice Recognition? We'll wait and see.
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