Why I love to Shuffle

I recently started travelling more often (two days a week for about 3 hours).
Fortunately I don’t drive, but I use the train. This means I can read, watch a movie, look outside.
The first times I read the newspaper, then I brought a book, sometimes I watched a movie.
Being a Mac user I thought I needed an iPod, using all the battery of my PowerBook to use iTunes didn’t sound so smart.
I was about to buy a nice iPod shuffle, the 1GB, but then I read some rumors that a 2GB version was coming so I decided to wait a little bit.
Thanks to DADA, one of the companies I’m consulting for, I received a FREE 512MB iPod shuffle.
It is not exactly the model I wanted, but they gave it for free and this made me happy enough.

I plugged it into my notebook (unfortunately it’s a little bit too wide and I need to unplug my mouse while recharging), but it worked like a charm. I formatted it and loaded some random songs.
To my surprise and happiness I listened to a number of songs that I hadn’t played for quite a while! The battery lasts even too much (now that it’s new) and I could probably play all the songs at least 3 times! I have never drained all the enrgy out of the battery, I always wanted to load more songs before the battery ran out.
The update process is really simple and takes a few minutes. It loads about 110-120 songs which are more than enough for my full trip.
Now I don’t go out if I don’t have my shuffle.

Pros:

• really easy to update and use
• tiny and super-lightweight
• plays a good number of songs

Cons:

• none

I really can’t find a real con they only I can think of is that all my songs don’t fit in it, but I have to admit that the “shuffle feature” made me discover a good number of songs that I hadn’t played for a long time and this become a pro automatically!
Anotehr thing that someone might identify as a con is that it doesn’t have a display. In my opinion the display was not in the original idea of the player. IMHO the real idea behind the Shuffle is to upload a bunch of songs automatically and play them while walking, running, etc, so you don’t need a siplay like on the iPod where you have all your songs and playlists and go pick your single song or pick your favourite playlist.
For what I believe was the target of the iPod shuffle, it’s a complete success!

And now a nice “action shot” that sows how useful it can be at the seaside.