Now A Member of the iPod Generation

Today, my iPod Shuffle that I won in a contest arrived. It’s a second generation Shuffle, so it’s tiny, particularly when you compare it to, say, a Nokia phone. When I finally got to a point in my day where I could open it, I had only a few minutes before I had to leave. I plugged in the dock, put the iPod Shuffle in. I already had iTunes open, which of course recognized the iPod and asked me a few questions about it. It then asks me to “autofill” the iPod with music. I had to tell it which playlist to use, it picked enough songs to fill up the iPod, which at the rate I encoded all my music, ended up being only 155 songs, rather than the 240 they say on the box, but I have to say it filled the iPod very fast.

The sound quality on the iPod is perfectly reasonable as far as I can tell. I am just amazed at how something so small can put out something that sounds good. The controls are simple, but elegant. I like the fact that if on the off chance you pull out the headset from the iPod while it’s playing, it automatically pauses the song you are listening to.

I think I would have a hard time using the iPod Shuffle for podcasts, primarily because I can’t exactly see which podcast I am listening to and I want to be able to choose the order. For music, it’s wonderful. It would be really fantastic for red-eye flights. Fill it up with music and go.

After having spent far too long on solutions for syncing my mobile phones to something on iTunes, I completely appreciate the ease of simplicity of how the iPod syncs with iTunes. It all “just works” and I don’t have to think too hard about it. That right there is why people love their iPods and iTunes: it’s an end-to-end solution that nobody else has come close to duplicating.