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On my drive home Monday - 100% humidity, 50 degrees - I felt a sudden conviction to go jogging. “You know what would be great, self?” I asked myself. “An iPod Shuffle. That would make the time pass like that,” I said, snapping my fingers to emphasize that. I ordered one immediately from Amazon (who claimed to be out of stock but shipped two days later) and went out to huff around the neighborhood sans music. It’s amazing what the body can do after months of sedentary behavior.

After three days of more sedentary behavior, it has arrived! I marveled at the packaging and had Chap take its portrait before plugging it in for a charge and loading 500 megabytes of MP3s on it from iTunes, then took it for a spin in the 40 degree weather as soon as I got home, but not before Glenn whupped my ass in 8-ball. Twice.

I really couldn’t be more happy with it. The iTunes interface is a nice pairing of simplicity and control, and as for the Shuffle interface itself - pretty near perfect. There’s no display aside from some status LEDs, and for my purposes I don’t miss it. If you need to find something, the ‘next track’ button is lickety-split. The controls on the whole are easy enough, though I didn’t so much as touch them during my jog except to tune the volume. If I were to nit-pick I would note that the power switch lacks texture, so it could be difficult to turn on to the middle setting (non-shuffle) sight unseen. I don’t have any of the accessory sport or armband cases, and I felt a little goofy with it dangling from the lanyard around my neck (sorry, no picture of that), but the thing’s so light that you’d never notice it bouncing around. Finally, the price point - $100 - is just right. Nice work, Apple.

Posted: Thursday, February 17th, 2005 at 9:54 pm; Category: Nerd Alert; Comments feed: RSS 2.0.
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