Yesterday I cancelled my order at the online Apple store. It was going to take them another two weeks to even begin shipping my Shuffle to me. Retailers everywhere had them in stock, so I bought it at BCC for €5 cheaper than at the Apple store.
The 2G means second generation, its contents is just the one Gigabyte.
Having never owned an iPod before, I can still say that this is the best iPod ever! It brings me music —something I’ve been missing ever since my cell phone broke 8 months ago— and besides that I hardly notice it’s there.
The interface is hugely intuitive.
For input the thing has five buttons and two sliders which do their job very well and should be enough for most functions (cell phones seem to do fine with a five-way navigator).
For output it has a small LED which blinks in yellow/green combinations and patterns and it has the audio jack which outputs: audio. I am amazed —looking at the cheatsheet— how much information they managed to squeeze from that single blinkenlight.
I do wonder if Apple will ever use the audio output modality for a more sophisticated interface. I can easily imagine a computer generated voice menu interface which you control using the five-way navigator.
This is of course easy to botch but I would trust Apple to pull it off properly.
