iPod Shuffle

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.

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.