THE UNTENDED UNDERLING IN THE iPOD FAMILY, | By | Shashank Tripathi (Gadabout) - See all my reviews   |
So I got myself a Shuffle, by far the sleekest small pod in the market.
But boy did I regret it.
After the one-time registration and initialization (which is not optional) the lemon wouldn't get the songs on it, thanks to the infamous "Disk not found error". Googled for it and discovered websites that are brimming with untended complaints; I'm on Windows XP, but the glitch seems to pervade operating systems.
Spent a day battling with the idiosyncrasies. Downloaded and installed an extra utility that Apple's Help site recommends. Enabled the Shuffle "for disk use". Reset it to factory settings and tried all over again, five times. And I'm a fairly persistent tech-savvy one. I did everything that's needed and more, but the stupid thing will still not remember the settings, will not let me change songs, and so on.
Tired with all of this rigmarole, I got a Creative Zen Stone Plus. It's a little larger than the Shuffle, but you can see why--Shuffle doesn't have a display and it uses the same jack for charging and earphones so you can only do one of those at a time. Stone Plus on the other hand connects through a small non-spaghetti USB cable, comes up instantly as a new drive on your PC, you copy the mp3 files from your music folder to this drive, and you're done.
I was up and running in 5 minutes flat. Can't help kicking myself for having fallen for the iPod luster.
Without becoming any clunkier in any meaningful way (both the doohickeys are pretty small), Stone Plus shows me the song that's playing, which I don't see on Shuffle. Stone Plus has an FM radio, a voice recorder, a timer, and a digital clock--none of which the Shuffle has. It charges in 5 minutes, which the Shuffle doesn't. I can use iTunes or any other tool or even nothing at all, but with Shuffle I am in an unhappy marriage with iTunes. The Stone Plus will hold about 1000 songs in comparison to Shuffle's 200 at the same bit-rate.
Because this is Creative, the company known among geeks for its speakers, the ear phones that come with the Stone Plus have a fabulous combination of bass and treble that will please the most fastidious connoisseur. After hearing them Shuffle's white thingies sound tinny and childish. I got my Stone Plus with a clip that makes it much more practical for running.
And all of it at 60% of the cost of a basic bare-bones Shuffle.
Sorry, Apple folks, in the small-mp3-player market Apple is simply the beautiful blond bimbo who trips on high heels at ten paces. If you're in the market for a nifty little mp3 player, skip the Shuffle. Even in the 3rd generation it's a 3rd rate contender.
Apple iPod Shuffle
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