From The Mossberg Solution:
I’ve been testing the new iPod Shuffle for a couple of days, and, in my tests, it fulfilled — and even exceeded — Apple’s claims for convenience, battery life and song capacity. Sound quality is so good you can barely believe the music is coming from something so small.
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Apple puts the new player’s battery life at 12 hours on a single charge. But, in my testing, it did much better than that, lasting 15 hours and 44 minutes.
Similarly, I found that the iPod Shuffle could hold many more songs than Apple claims. By choosing manual mode to load the player, I was able to cram as many as 188 songs onto my 512-megabyte test model, rather than the 120 Apple claims, without reducing the audio quality of the songs. That’s because Apple’s calculation is based on four-minute songs, but many pop and rock tunes, especially those from the ’60s and ’70s, are actually much shorter than that.
It weighs less than an ounce.