Redesigned iPod shuffle: 4GB, Buttonless, VoiceOver Text to Speech, $79

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Design, Music, Portable Audio / Video

This morning Apple unveiled a brand new, re-imagined iPod shuffle. The new shuffle hits you with 4GB of storage space, which equates to about a 1,000 song capacity, and is half the size of the previous generation iPod shuffle, which in and of itself was pretty freaking small. Another new feature is VoiceOver, which is basically a text-to-speech technology built into the shuffle. Since there is no screen, sometimes it’s hard to know what’s playing. With VoiceOver, you press a button and the shuffle will tell you the name of the song and artist, as well as the name of the playlist, if applicable. VoiceOver is available in the following languages: English, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish.

The downside? For some reason Apple thought it best to move all the controls on the shuffle to the headphone cable. You simple cannot control the iPod shuffle from the actual device. This immediately limits the number of headphones available, because even if you own a pair of fantastic $150 headphones, if those headphones don’t have controls, you are screwed and left with the crap Apple headphones that ship with the device.