For the techies here: At first I was wondering how the hell they fit a text to speech engine in that little package - but in the vid they explain that the new shuffle's VoiceOver feature uses a different voice for windows and mac. Ahhhh. So it seems that they must be getting the OS to do the text to speech, store the output as little audio files alongside each track/playlist and then play them back when the user requests it.<p>Typical Apple - simple, clever solution to a seemingly complex problem.
The first music player that talks to you? You don't even have to look outside of Apple's own product line up to see that's not true, the Nano has it.<p><a href="http://www.apple.com/ipodnano/specs.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.apple.com/ipodnano/specs.html</a><p>"Spoken menus allow listeners to hear many of the names of menus, song titles, and artists without viewing the screen."
<i>incredibly popular shuffle feature</i><p>I agree that the shuffle iPod itself is very popular but do many people actually use the shuffle <i>feature</i>?<p>I like the shuffle because it's small and light-weight - even my first generation one. Which has 512MB - my factor-of-ten improvement rule means it's approximately time to upgrade.
Usability is a serious concern, because most navigation is done with one button, Click, Double-click, Triple-click. Click-and-hold. <a href="http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3458" rel="nofollow">http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3458</a>
The one exception is stepping through playlists - <i>with the volume controls</i>. It's modal (modeful?), so you have to track of the state of the device to know the meaning of the controls.<p>This is terrible UI design, and very unlike Apple. A symptom of Steve's absence?
<i>Apple Announces Incredible New iPod shuffle</i><p><i>iPod shuffle is based on Apple’s incredibly popular shuffle feature</i><p><i>Pod shuffle is the smallest music player in the world and is incredibly easy to clip to almost anything</i><p>This all sounds pretty credible to me. Basically, now it can use playlists and it can use text-to-speech to tell you what song is playing.