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MP3 PLAYER
| APPLE IPOD SHUFFLE |
| P6,990 (512MB) | |
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Hey, where did that Air Supply track come from?
When you first see it, memories of iPod bliss are triggered: that special shade of white, that circle surrounded by four buttons. But this is something else. It's hard to believe how small it is. Put three sticks of Marlboro Lights side by side, and the iPod shuffle still manages to be smaller.
At the back, you have a slick switch which has three settings: off, sequential play , and random play. It's this that makes this player a big deal. Hence the name shuffle, natch.
Life is random, they say, and we'll admit, Apple really did do their homework. We were told that iPod users most commonly hit shuffle and leave their iPod playing, skipping songs they don't like. Hearing that, we felt like Apple had been spying on us all this time. (Hi Steve.)
Just like Kuya iPod, the shuffle syncs effortlessly with Apple's latest iTunes software. Click on the iPod icon and you get something of a different menu than usual. In one corner is a little button labeled Autofill. With one press, it grabs a random selection from your library and copies it onto your shuffle. If you want to get fancy, you can customize Autofill so that it copies random songs from a certain playlist, or songs of a certain rating, artist, or genre. It's a feature that's sure to come in handy.
After you click Autofill, be prepared to wait. This isn't FireWire. This is USB - USB 2.0 if you've got it, otherwise USB 1.1. On an old USB 1.1 iBook, it took around 15 minutes to fill the shuffle to the brim. We squeezed in around a hundred songs, most of which were encoded at 192 kbps or higher.
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512MB (up to approx 120 songs). USB connectivity. 12-hour battery life..
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Cheaper or with a screen would have squashed the competition, but the iPod shuffle does the trick nonetheless.
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So we stuffed the familiar white earbuds into our ears, switched the the player to shuffle and pressed play. Nothing. Maybe the first track is a quiet one, we thought, and cranked up the volume. Pressed play again, cranked up the volume again. Still nothing. Pressed play one more time and we were deafened to kingdom come by the opening bars of a Green Day song. What's that, you say? None of this would ever have happened if there were a screen.
At P6,990 for the 512MB version and P9,990 for the 1GB version, the shuffle sounds a little expensive, but it's actually priced similarly to competing brands of the same capacity-- except they have screens! For that alone, we would have lowered the rating, except, having used these other brands before, we know that they're a pain to use even with a screen. And there's the rub. You can get a player with a screen which doesn't work so well, or you can get an iPod shuffle which works fine but constantly leaves you guessing. So all in all, the shuffle is a fine choice. We just wish they had either made it cheaper or with a screen. That way, there would have been no questions whatsoever. - Phil Sales
 Post your opinion or own review!
T3 Magazine Philippines - April 2005 Issue
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