Hi, I’m Sean Carruthers and welcome to the first of the three-part series on the new iPod Shuffle, the 3rd Generation of the iPod Shuffle. First, you got the previous generation up here, this is 2nd Generation, this is the third one. It’s a little bit narrower but taller, more in a shape of a stick of gum than before.
Taking a look at the back, it’s all clipped like beforehand so you can attach it to a shirt or a pair of jean short or something like so that you don’t lose it when you are exercising. The switches on this it’s found on the one side of it. This one has On/Off on the one side and also has a switch to switch you between loop mode and shuffle mode. This one actually integrates all three of them into a single form or into a single switch, so off on the one side then loop and then shuffle. It’s a little bit hard to make out the writing on there but it is right there.
So in doing the tutor of that, there’s really not much all on this one. And the first thing you may be wondering is, well how do I control it? Obviously, this one has the – the dial here that lets you play and pause, change your tracks and change your volumes. This one doesn’t really have that. So to with that, I’ll bring in the second one. This one also comes in black. In addition to the shuffle is the 4 gigabytes.
Now how they’ve gone around that problem is by integrating it into the headphone cable. Now the previous generation, you press the unit itself to play, pause or skip. And that wasn’t always convenient because you’ll be reaching down and not really looking necessarily to see where you going and remembering the orientation of the controls were sometimes a little bit challenged so you would have to memorize that.
This one right here, it assumes that your headphone is always up, so reaching down the cord, you’ll always have access to the volume control up on the top, go in control down on the bottom. So plus and minus acts as your volume control, just like on the iPhone. Now there’s a button in the center here. And what that does is it access your control for everything else, so you might wonder how a single button could do that. So we’ll just to try out here to press play, we just press it once. And now we have our music playing, press it again, it pauses it. Now we’ll get going again so you can see the next step.
Now to skip forward on a track or to go back, you have to press it multiple times. So to go to forward, you press twice. And that will go to the next track. Go back, you press three times [Demonstration]. Like so. In addition to that, this button also has other features. One of them called voice – now none of the iPhone or the iPod Shuffles have had an LCD screen, so you could never tell what was playing at any given time. Now, you think on the devices that small, you wouldn’t necessarily need to you know or be on it.
Now this is a 4 gigabytes, that’s a lot of room for things. And you may be jut having the – your iTunes libarary automatically fill this new little device with tracks. You might not know everything that you have on there, you may have bought a few things or you just may have forgotten. So, how do you got around this on this new player? Is by holding down the button, it’ll actually reroute the name of the track using your computerized voice. Now that’s through iTunes and it puts it on the device when you load the music into it. So, by holding it down, again it’ll tell you what it is.
When you press Pause and you fast-forward, every time you go to another track it’ll actually read it out. So you’ll know before you actually press Play or that’s the right one. And once you hear what you want, you just need to press Play.
Now the other feature on this is that if you hold it and hold it down even longer, it’ll read out the name of the track and it’ll be – and that would start reading out playlist. So previous generations of the iPod Shuffle didn’t have playlist thing, it was just one gigantic directory which is a little bit inconvenient when you are going back and forth and trying to find the tracks that you want. Now by having playlist, you can actually have several different types of modes on here, you know one for a warm up, one for a cool down, one that’s electronic, one that’s world music, whatever you want to listen to at any given time. And by doing that, you just hold it down until it starts reading out the playlist. Again, we’ll do that again sinking here a bit more clearly.
When you hear the playlist that you actually want, you would press the button and it’ll go into that. Now if you heard it down, you can actually skip forward by pressing the plus or minus really quickly and then by pressing that when you get to the one that you want. That’ll actually allow you to run through a whole of pile of them very quickly without having to listen to them for minutes on end.
Anyways, that’s the end of the first part on this. We’ll talk about playlist management and dealing with the iPod Shuffle if you don’t actually want to have to deal with these headphones on the two upcoming episodes.
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