Okay, so this isn't going to be the epic analyses that my first two iPod reviews were, but here are my impressions on my shuffle now that I've had it for about a month.
Honestly, I like the shuffle for what it does, but it's really not cut out to do everything I need in my primary music player. Here's a brief run down of my primary issues:
- My biggest complaint is that while the shuffle increments the play count, it does not update the "last updated" field. This kind of turns out to be the death blow for my using the shuffle to listen to the 5000 some odd songs in my library that I haven't actually listened to yet. I would have even settled for iTunes setting the "Last Played" to now on sync, but as is, it's a huge pain to figure out what I just listened to, which kind of defeats my ability to use the shuffle as a tool to weed out my library.
- The number of times I've wanted to know what song is playing has got to be in the several dozens already, which translates to "I want a screen." However, it is worth mentioning that half of the music on my shuffle is specifically music in my library with playcount = 0, which makes the wanting to know what song is playing a lot more common than when I'm listening to the "all my favorite snowboarding music" playlist.
- Generating an appropriate playlist out of my 15,000 song library can be a little tedious. I've resorted to a set of nested smart playlists for my "every day random use," and I have a custom "active" playlist I use otherwise. Unfortunately, without "last played," my smart playlists playlist isn't as smart as I want it to be.
- The feedback when first starting up the shuffle is pretty terrible. For some reason it can take several seconds after hitting play before it starts, and in that time the feedback about what its doing is very unclear ("wait, what's that green light mean again?"). I often end up hitting play/pause several times until I finally hear music. "Just hit play for awhile... when you hear my voice, you've pressed play enough."
- And an absurd detail: the shuffle is too small to actually wrap the headphone wire around, so I keep ending up with knots in my headphone wire when I stuff the shuffle into my pocket. Annoying.
- Speaking of the headphones, I've been using the white iPod headphones with the shuffle because my old earbuds finally died, and I've got to say, they make me feel remarkably self conscious. I don't like showing off my hip iPod! (And by the way, I had an [iPod] before you know what one was)
- And then, of course, there were the weird issues I had with beepy skipping, etc, when I used it while snowboarding a couple of weeks ago.
Other than those little problems, I do like it for what it does. It's so small and light that you don't notice you're carrying it at all, the song shuffle is kinda fun when you know all the songs that it's shuffling through, and I like it for what it does. That said, I can't help but admit that I miss my full featured iPod.
Maybe tomorrow's rumored announcements will yield something that will actually meet my non-snowboarding needs.