Ars Technica reviews Apple’s 2G iPod shuffle: ‘extremely small, efficient, and well designed’

“Apple announced the second incarnation of its budget iPod, the iPod shuffle, at its widely-anticipated ‘It’s Showtime’ event in September. The new shuffle is notably smaller, thinner, and lighter than the original, with the addition of an aluminum case and a built-in clip,” Jacqui Cheng reports for Ars Technica.

“The shuffle is slightly larger than the iPod nano’s screen,” Cheng reports. “The 2G iPod shuffle uses the 3.5mm stereo headphone minijack for everything—audio, power, and syncing. It doesn’t have the usual iPod connector that we’re used to for all other iPods. This could become an annoyance to people who go on the road a lot and will be forced to take a dock while traveling instead of just a cord, or to those crazy iPod fanatics (*ahem*) who own more than one iPod and would like to use just one cable or dock with them all. That ‘Universal’ iPod Connector/Dock? It’s no longer universal.”

“After nearly six attempts to drop it with the headphones in my ears, I realized that the shuffle is too lightweight to even detach from the headphones when dropped. It just falls and dangles, never coming into contact with the cold, hard pavement. I was forced to be creative, so I simply draped the headphones over the back of my neck and dropped the shuffle. It hit concrete this time; when I checked the headphones, it was still playing. Everything functioned as expected,” Cheng reports.

Apple new iPod shuffle is “extremely small, efficient, and well designed,” Cheng reports. The 2G iPod shuffle is the “best value iPod yet” and it “can survive nearly any real world situation.”

Full comprehensive review, in which Cheng drops the shuffle 40-feet off a balcony, drops it into a glass of beer, and runs it over with a carhere.

[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “jojo” for the heads up.]

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