During the holiday season, I was given an iPod 1GB shuffle (pictured above), my first iPod. I’ve not been a big fan of the majority of the iPod product line. I think they tend to be overpriced, have clunky interfaces, and I’m not a big fan of iTunes either. For the money, if you’re looking for storage and a good price, Creative and iriver are probably better bets. I also have an Apacer shuffle like ripoff that I’ve been using for a couple years, which at the time seemed like a good deal.

So, now I have an iPod. When I opened it up, i was surprised how damn small it is. It’s small enough that I would worry about losing it. The docking station is a little inconvenient because you can’t use a normal USB cable at all to connect or charge it, but to keep the unit simple I see why they did it the way they did. The first thing I tried was installing iTunes, version 7.5. What a failure that was. No matter how many times I installed, uninstalled, reinstalled, iTunes would never come up. What I finally ended up doing, was just using an older version (7.2) that installed and worked. I’m afraid to upgrade now, in case it doesn’t work and I screw up my library trying to downgrade later. It’s running, though, and that’s all I can ask for.

I don’t actually like using iTunes though, so in reality, I’m using Winamp to manage my songs and transfers. I find it less clunky than iTunes. Using the actual iPod is easy. The buttons make sense, the battery life is great (> 12 hours), and it’s nice to just clip it on and go. When checking the prices, I found that they can be bought for anywhere from $70.00 to $80.00, which seems completely reasonable for the form factor, battery life, and easy of use. The tiny size is definitely a premium feature worth paying for.

So, I still don’t think I would buy a regular iPod, but I am a fan of the small shuffles. I’m enjoying mine, listening to podcasts, music, and audio books for hours and hours on a tiny device.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 27th, 2007 at 3:11 pm and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.