My hand me down will do me a little longer but..

Apple ditches buttons on new iPod Shuffle

A handout photo shows the smaller version of Apple's popular iPod Shuffle music player with a new feature that announces songs to its user.

March 12, 2009 - 7:14AM
The Age

Apple has unveiled a minuscule new buttonless iPod Shuffle that is half the size of existing model and which employs a new voice feature.

The third-generation Shuffle, a slim aluminium rectangle less than 5cm long, takes up about half as much space as the previous version even as it doubles music storage space to 4 gigabytes.

To achieve such a tiny form, Apple had to remove most of the buttons from the body of the $129 device and build them into the headphone cord instead.

"Smaller has tended to work very well for us," said Greg Joswiak, a marketing vice president at Apple.

The trade-off for the new Shuffle always has been the lack of a screen to visually navigate through the music stored on the device. The first-generation Shuffle, which launched in 2005, could hold about 240 songs, arguably not enough to warrant a screen.

Now that the device can carry 1000 songs, Apple has come up with a way for people to identify the music they're listening to or find songs they want.

A new feature called VoiceOver can, at the push of a button, speak the song and artist name or rattle off the list of custom mixes — called playlists — that the owner has loaded onto the device.

Here's how it works: As you synchronise a new Shuffle using an updated version of iTunes, your PC or Mac looks at each track and playlist and creates a small file of a computerised voice speaking the title, artist for playlist name.

If a song is in Spanish or Chinese, say, the software figures this out and speaks in the appropriate language.

Apple says the device can handle 14 languages including English, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish.

The new Shuffle, which comes in silver or black aluminium with a shiny stainless steel clip, is set to go on sale today. Joswiak said Apple's own earphones will be the only option for early buyers, but that other companies plan to make compatible headphones as well as adapters for regular headphones.

Ross Rubin, an analyst for market researcher NPD Group, said there's no such thing as "too small" for gadget-happy consumers as long as Apple stays focused on ergonomics and provides a way to secure the device and keep it from getting lost.

But people who do buy a new Shuffle will be paying a premium for Apple's design, he added, noting less-expensive mini-models like SanDisk's Sansa Clip and Creative Technology's Zen Stone.

Shares of Apple jumped $US3.91, or 4.4 per cent, to $US92.54 in afternoon trading.