So who is this Stam anyway?

iPod Shuffle

Sure enough...

They said it would take 3-4 weeks for the 512MB version to come in. I rang up a bigger chain in the biggest shopping center in Melbourne and they told me the same: 3-4 weeks.

I bought mine three days after they said that--and they told me Apple's website was saying it was supposed to take another 3-4 weeks.

Personal review?

Pros:

It's light. It's really, really light. We're talking about the size of a slightly longer-than-usual cigarette lighter but half the weight. I keep it in my jacket pocket and I can't even feel that it's there.
For comparison, my family's also got a 128MB-everything-included USB player. It's about as long, more than three times as thick and weighs at least four times as much.

512MB storage. I keep 90 songs on it and still have 50MB dedicated for file-transfer (it's not full, either--I could fit a few more on without problems).

Sound quality gets two thumbs up.

It works brilliantly with iTunes (of course) and is instantly recognisable as an iPod just by the headphones alone (kids are so perceptive :-P ).

Simple control method--on/off, play/pause, skip forwar/backward and volume.

Shuffle is my favorite method of playing my music :-)

Cons:

As I believe Karen mentioned already--it's expensive and I do worry about losing it. The negligible weight doesn't help much; it could probably fall out of my pocket and I wouldn't notice the difference. (I keep it on an inside pocket, though. It's got the lanyard and headphones attached, so theoretically it should be rather visible if it does try to sneak its way out.)

No screen, so you couldn't find a specific song in a 90-song playlist unless you'd had it memorized. Especially in shuffle mode.

Neckstrap lanyard hooks onto the USB cap, so although I've stress-tested it by bouncing it up and down on the string (Over my bed, of course! No, I'm not stupid.) and it didn't come off, theoretically there's the possibility.
Then again, when I was trying to get the regular USB cap off in the store to test it, the outside of the cap came off before the rest did...the two little ball-bearing-things are nice and tight :-)

iTunes totally takes over the thing. If you eject it from iTunes, you can't even use it as a drive in Windows unless you remove it and re-plug it in. (I haven't tried plugging it in without iTunes open yet.) Of course, it also doesn't allow you to transfer any songs to or from your iPod unless it's registered with that particular copy of iTunes. (Haven't tried to search for them using Explorer yet either.)

All in all, though? I'm a happy customer :-)

Posted by adam at February 27, 2005 01:53 AM