No Wasted Moves

So after a little bit of stuffing around with missed deliveries, I finally have my new iPod Shuffle. Happy days!

I ordered it last Wednesday morning. I think it was the size of it, and wanting to buy something so that Mactalk got a cut that won me over so quickly. This seemed like the perfect opportunity.

Obviously it came well packaged…

The only difference to the standard retail packaging was a bit of white plastic wrapped around the outside of the plastic box.

I got mine laser engraved. Figured if I was buying online, I may as well take advantage of the free engraving service. I won’t be getting a case for it (really not that much to protect!), so the engraving will be pretty much the only unique identifier on it. I suspect lots of people will end up with these, so easier to have it personalised. The engraving is top quality too. There is about 1cm of horizontal space to engrave on, and they’ve fitted 12 perfectly legible characters on one line. Apple really have a good machine for doing this!

The USB sync cable is perfectly compact, just like the shuffle. I plug it into the back of my desktop keyboard and – kind of obviously – it seems made for it. It’s about 7-8cm long, so it won’t be a hassle to pack if you want to use your shuffle as removable storage.

I’ll reiterate what pretty much everyone is saying. This iPod is TINY. A miniturised Nano. About the size of a recent model USB drive, the build quality is amazing for something this small. It’s machined. Refined. Engineered. Metallic. It’s got that all metal feel that I love about my MacBook Pro. It’s all class.

All of the playback controls are on the headphones. The controls work well, the voiceover thing is pretty cool. Much better than I’d expected based on the promo video on the Apple site. The sound quality is decent enough for what I plan on using this for (commuting & exercise). When I want big sound, I’ll plug my big headphones into the laptop. So, I’m happy. It’ll be interesting to see if a remote cable accessory is on the market soon to allow people who do what to use their own headphones to do so if they wish.

All in all, I’m really happy with it. I wouldn’t want it as my only iPod, but for having on hand for when you just want to listen to something and don’t hugely care what, it is perfect. Well done Apple!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 18th, 2009 at 10:04 pm and is filed under Geekery. 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.