Apple iPod shuffle 1 GB > Reviews (175)

One of the best pieces of running kit I ever bought was not an expensive pair of running shoes, nor one of those fancy running vests that supposedly help keep you dry and cook when you sweat. Not, it was a tiny little 1GB iPod Shuffle. Strangely, at the time I had a cheap pair of running shoes and no special running vest, so at £44.00 it was also the most expensive piece of running equipment I had ever bought, but it soon proved to be well worth the cost, especially as it's proved the most durable piece of running kit I have - even more so than my legs, on occasion.

You see, whilst I enjoy my running, I'm not a particularly good self-motivator. As long as I can run on the shoulder of someone, I can go for miles, but when I'm on my own I tend to do fewer miles and at a slower pace - assuming I make it out of the house at all. However, research has shown that running to music can be a powerful motivating force, both in terms of increasing distance and speed and several people I knew often ran with music playing. At the time, however, the only music player I had was a mobile phone which would have been a little too cumbersome to carry (I hate running with something in my hands) and wouldn't be secured anywhere about my person. An iPod shuffle was the only obvious answer.

What I ended up with was a blue, 1GB, second generation iPod Shuffle. I wanted the silver, but it was out of stock and I turned down the chance to spend an extra £15 on the 2GB version, as I knew the 1GB would store about 9 hours of music and I didn't anticipate running any longer than that. The design is simplicity itself, a rectangle of brushed aluminium about 4 cm long by 2.5 cm wide and maybe half a centimetre thick with a large clip on the back, with the whole thing weighing something like 15 g. The buttons were minimal, with an on and off switch and a selector to either shuffle the songs or not on the top, plus the play and volume levels in the traditional Apple circular theme on the front, with volume up and down on the up and down parts of the circle and skip forward and back on right and left, with play/pause in the middle.

When I first got the Shuffle home, I found setting it up to be really simple, although it did help that I'm not entirely inexperienced with gadgets and already had iTunes installed on my PC. For those without iTunes, this will need to be downloaded, as Apple's iPods only seem to allow songs to be uploaded to them from other Apple products, although other mp3 players may be compatible with other music software if that's what you use. However, for me, set up was almost pathetically easy. I just took the Shuffle out of the box, connected it to the charging stand and plugged that into my PC with the USB attachment and off it went. Setting it up to sync in with my iTunes was a matter of minutes and I was ready to put my music onto my new iPod.

This is where I started to have a few problems with the iPod Shuffle. Not that putting the music on it was difficult. There are several ways in which this can be achieved.

You can either drag or drop directly from iTunes into the iPod when it's connected to your PC, or you can ask it to automatically fill itself either from your entire library or from individual play lists you may have set up on your iTunes. The problem comes when you're as big a music fan as I am, yet horribly indecisive. I currently have more than 8000 songs on my iTunes and the Shuffle would accept only around 100 of these. It is at times like this that the Autofill feature comes in handy and even on the first set up, it doesn't take more than a few minutes to add all the songs to the iPod, even if you're filling it up more or less completely. What does take a fair amount of time is fully charging the battery.

There are two play options on the Shuffle, which are selected from a switch at the top of the unit. You can opt to either play the songs in the order you have placed them on the Shuffle, or play them in a random mode which Apple call "shuffle" mode, hence the name of the unit. I never used the play in order mode, as I always used the Autofill mode on my Shuffle, which selects songs from the play list in a fairly random order and thus made the play in order slightly redundant, as I was effectively always going to get the songs in a relatively random order no matter which option I had selected. However, if you placed whole albums on the Shuffle deliberately to play them as a whole, I can see how this option would have been useful, but that wasn't something I ever did.

I found the Shuffle to be perfect for my needs. The clip was very strong and it clipped securely to the pocket of my running shorts and the earphone cable was long enough to reach from there to my ears without affecting my running position, but wasn't so long it was flap about all over the place and potentially get caught up with anything I may have been running past. The Shuffle, being a hard drive player, played without skipping, regardless of how quickly I was moving and the clip was strong enough that it rarely slipped, putting strain on my ears as the cable moved or becoming loose and unclipping from my shorts. Even now, having had the Shuffle for near enough 3 years and running countless miles with it, the spring on the clip is still strong enough to keep it in place.

Unlike some, I also found that the headphones were suitable for me. Admittedly, they are fairly low quality and after several years, some of the plastic bits around the connector and the earphones themselves are showing some wear, but they generally retain position in my ears fairly well and the sound quality, whilst a little tinny, is suitable to listening to whilst I'm running, walking or travelling. They're not sound-blocking, but the volume on the Shuffle is adjustable enough and goes high enough that I found I could shut out many of the sounds around me. Fortunately, for those people who don't like the earphones, the headphone connection is a standard one, so replacing them with your own choice of earphones or headphones is easily achieved, but not something I have ever needed to do.

There were a couple of minor annoyances I found with my Shuffle, however. The first was that the battery indicator wasn't particularly clear. There was a tiny LED on the top that lights up in various colours when you turn the Shuffle on to indicate whether the Shuffle was fully charged, or how low the battery was getting. However, this gives no indication of exactly how long you had left on the battery and there was also no idea given by that little light as to how much charge had gone into the Shuffle whilst connected to the PC. Several times I was mislead by the light stopping flashing whilst I had it connected to my PC, which I thought meant it had stopped charging and was full, when it actually only meant that it had finished adding all the music to the Shuffle.

This meant that I would occasionally get part way through a day's commute and find my battery had run out and on one particularly annoying occasion, the Shuffle went flat 9 miles into a Half Marathon in which I'd been doing rather well and disrupted my rhythm. But for this to happen on few occasions in several years isn't too bad and, fortunately, it wasn't often a problem as the Shuffle battery life is immense. With the very simple functionality of the Shuffle, it doesn't place a lot of strain on the battery and so it seems to last forever, so it's unusual to find yourself getting caught out with regards to the battery running down at an inopportune moment.

The other minor annoyance I had with the Shuffle was that it there was no way of knowing what song you were listening to at any point, apart from waiting until you got home and trying to trace it from the play order on your iTunes. Again, this wasn't often a problem, but with adding songs to the Shuffle completely at random as I did, you do sometimes come across a song from an album you hadn't listened to often or recently and so I didn't recognise the song, yet having enjoyed it had no way of easily finding it again to listen to the CD in full later on at home.

Fortunately, I've been pleased to note recently, these issues have been fixed in the new 4th generation iPod Shuffle. There is now a little button on the top of the new Shuffle which apparently can be used to check both the battery life and to find out the details of the song you are listening to. I thought my old 2nd generation Shuffle was a decent enough machine, but with a couple of minor things that could be improved. The 4th generation Shuffle appears to have solved the minor issues I had and is available for less money than I paid for my Shuffle 2 years ago and for more space, with the new 2GB Shuffle being priced at around £39.

For those who want to listen to music whilst exercising or travelling, I thoroughly recommend the iPod Shuffle for those who already have all their music on iTunes. For those who don't, there are cheaper alternatives out there and if you're going to have to mess around putting music onto your PC before you do anything, you have little to lose by going for a different version.

But for sheer ease for those who already have all their music on iTunes as I had, the Shuffle is hard to beat. It's simple to put music on, plays wonderfully and the clip and the weight of the Shuffle are perfect to be able to conceal or hold it in position well whilst exercising, which is exactly what I was looking for from an mp3 player. My little 1GB 2nd generation iPod Shuffle was ideal for my needs and I love it. If you're a keen runner, I can't help but feel from what I've heard about it, the 2GB 4th Generation sounds even better, perhaps pretty close to perfect for me needs and good enough to tempt me into considering an upgrade, which is something I rarely, if ever, do when the old piece of machinery is still in perfect working order.