It's been a while! There's been a fair few product updates and I've been nowhere to be seen. I'm a bad blogger.

So, there's a new iPod Shuffle out (scant days after Jake received his in the post). It's tiny!

shuffle09

Apparently, the insides of this thing weigh just 10% more than a sheet of A4 paper. Apple are calling it the smallest music player in the world, but I'm sure that won't last long. It's almost half the size of the last version (which was bloody small!), and has twice the capacity - 4gb. It's very minimalist in design, there are no buttons on it at all, just a switch to select between shuffle, straight and off. The controls are all in a little nubby on the right earpiece cable.

Which is a bit of a problem for me, were I to get one of these puppies. I don't get on with Apple standard issue earbuds. I don't know if my ears are a funny shape or what, but after about fifteen minutes use, my ears get really sore. Other companies have already started to release compatible earphones, and Apple have said they'll be releasing an adaptor with the controls on it (at additional cost, of course).

The controls are such that you have a volume up and down toggle, and then one button that does different things depending on how you press it. It sounds pretty confusing, but Apple say it's intuitive, and they tend to get things like this right. The best thing is, no more fiddling to skip a track - just a click of a button which is easily accessible, right there on the cord.

A stand out feature is VoiceOver - something that's been available on the new Nano for a while, but on the screenless Shuffle is a great idea. Basically, you hold the button for a couple of seconds and your Shuffle tells you what the current song is. That in itself is of limited use - it's your playlist, you should know what you've put in there. But the great thing is, this allows you to browse playlists too, so you can have more than one playlist on the device. I only use mine in the gym, it has a load of high tempo dancey tracks on it to keep me motivated - but if I could, I would have other stuff on there too. This is very useful in such a miniscule device.

I don't think the Shuffle would ever be my sole portable music device, but this tiny little beauty is even more useful now than it was this time last week.

Click here for the official site.