Apple iPod Shuffle 1 GB

There's something I fancy much more than the iPod Shuffle itself: it's marketing. The guys in Apple's marketing have taken the simplest, most fundamental feature in portable music players and have built an entire campaign around it and even named the player the "Shuffle". Since the birth of portable audio CD players (twenty years ago, at least?), everyone has had a shuffle play function. So what's the big difference between Apple's shuffle play and the one you have in your MP3 player? "Life is random", "Random is the New Order", "Welcome to a life less orderly." The one-liners are smartly succinct, but what's to become of the Shuffle? That's a looming uncertainty...

The iPod Shuffle is a flash-based MP3 player, unlike the other regular iPod and the more recent iPod Photo, which have a 1.8" hard disk inside. The Shuffle has a flash memory chip, which has no moving parts and hence is much more durable and lightweight. And it's also so much thinner and compact than the regular iPod - 8.6 cm high, 2.6 cm wide and 0.8 cm thick! It's featherweight, at only 22 grams! If you are running at 800 x 600 pixels on a 15" monitor, then the picture below will be of actual size...

These three attributes - durable, lightweight, more compact - make the Shuffle (and flash-based players in general) more suited for an active lifestyle - jogging, exercising and extreme outdoor activities. Though I have a feeling it won't be the most important thing on your mind when you're suspended from a rope * through two metal holds stuff inside rocks at an altitude of several thousand feet. But... it's handy in case that happens. In fact, your Nomad Jukebox Zen even comes with a warning that specifically prohibits you from using the player in those conditions. So, if you're the lazy couch potato music lover, you really won't find much use for the Shuffle. But if you're really lazy enough to not want to get out of the house, then you don't need a portable player in the first place!

Durable, lightweight and smaller. But to have all of these qualities, you have to make some sacrifice. First and foremost, the storage capacity. With the iPod or the iPod Photo, you get upwards of 40 GB of space to store over 10,000 songs, but with the Shuffle's 1 GB, you can only store about 240 average four-minute songs in 128 Kbps MP3 format. Push the compression a little further and you can squeeze out about 300 songs at decently listenable quality (96 Kbps MP3 or AAC). While this may sound a lot less, it's the nature of the use that justifies it completely. Your jogs and workout sessions probably don't last for over four hours a day - and four unique hours of music is exactly what the 1 GB shuffle gives you.

Then, there's no LCD display, so it's difficult to figure out which song is playing and almost nightmarish to find a particular song that you want to play. But then again, a limit of around 240 songs will make you fill the Shuffle with only your favorite tunes that you probably know the full history of, let alone the title and artist info.