Review: iPod Shuffle 3rd Gen.

When looking for a portable, simplistic, and more importantly cheap way to enjoy your music, it's obvious to look for the best on the market. Easily, the iPod Shuffle 3rd Generation can arguably be, in my opinion, the best revision to the Shuffle lineup yet.

Design:

With virtually no buttons or much to press at all for that matter on the external part of the Shuffle, besides the on & off button located on the top, Apple jumped onto their previously thought-out idea of transferring the buttons to the headset itself. When the iPhone was released, we saw a simple version of this concept with the remote being only able to "click" on the lower end of the device. With every control in an even more accessible place, you can easily clip your iPod to your backpack or pocket, and listen to your music without ever having to worry about getting the iPod out to switch the song. RIght now, it's only available in black, or their well known silver color, but we can expect from past experience that Apple will release other colors into the lineup within the coming months.

Portability:

As with the previous generation Shuffle, Apple has also included it's well loved clip on the reverse side of the iPod. This provides it's user with a much better solution to when running, exercising, or even just relaxing around home rather then having to go out and purchase a holster, case, or some kind of 3rd party device to clip the iPod to themselves. The company has proved themselves out with this one; they made the iPod Shuffle 3rd Generation even smaller then before. The previous generation seemed to be the perfect size for the hand, and when clipped onto your body, you could barely even notice it. The new version now feels even better now being about the same size as a small USB Flash Drive.

New Software Features:

Every time Apple introduces a new revision to a certain product line, they try to provide the customer with a product that gets them more "bang for their buck," while still improving on it's level of usage from a hardware, and software standpoint. Apple has now introduced a new feature to the iPod Shuffle known now as VoiceOver. Now with just a press of the remote control's center button. the Shuffle will announce the title of the song, and the artist that sings it making it much easier to identify what the user is listening to. The voice for the Mac version of the software is well known "Alex" from the Mac OS X platform. I found that I did not really use the VoiceOver functionality very often, but when I needed to try it out, it proved itself successful. The previous generations made it hard to have to shuffle through all 200+ songs and now with the newer model, 4GB presents even more music capacity then that. It would be a great pain to have to search through every song on your iPod until you found those select few that you loved listening to when you're doing something around home or at the gym. Luckily, Apple planned ahead and built support for playlists into the Shuffle. Using the VoiceOver function, the iPod, when asked to, will speak the name of the current playlist you're listening to that way you can find exactly what you're looking for in a timely manner.

Overall, I think that the iPod Shuffle 3rd Generation has been the greatest revision to the Shuffle lineup yet and would easily receive an 8 out of 10. It would be nice to see Apple allow 3rd Party support for the headphones socket, but it's not the end of the world to have to use the supplied earbuds.

By the way, tonight April 8th, we will be having a 25$ iTunes Giftcard giveaway at ExceltiaLive.com around 10 PM EST. Hope to see you there!