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iPod Shuffle Finds Its Voice
theodp writes "Steve Jobs wasn't around to convince you that you should be impressed, but on Wednesday Apple unveiled a 4GB Shuffle that's half the size of its predecessor. Holding up to 1,000 songs, the pre-shrunk Shuffle sports a 10-hour battery life and also adds a new VoiceOver feature that can recite song titles, artists, and playlist names, as well as provide status information. Even without a show from Steve, the new player is generally leaving folks dazzled, although there are some complaints."
Update: 3/14 at 14:10 by SS: Reader Mike points out some disturbing news that the new Shuffle contains DRM which, according to a review at iLounge, prevents it from fully working with any headphones that don't have an Apple "authentication chip."
Congratulations, you just signed up to regular ass-rapings from Apple every time you need some new headphones. I hope you like iTunes too.
I suppose at least it charges from USB, which is more than my 3rd gen iPod does. Having to take that Firewire charger everywhere is what made me replace it.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Well put.
I would like to add 'Fuck Apple. Fuck them up their stupid assholes'.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
Hahhahaha, seriously. Rockbox is the biggest piece of shit I've ever used. Let's see, tons of useless, buggy, poorly-implemented features, a horrible UI, and poor hardware support. Who the hell needs FLAC support on a portable device, anyway? It's good for killing battery life and disk space, and that's about it. Between the terrible UI, countless bugs, and "features" such as reduced battery life, you'd have to be out of your mind to use that POS. I understand how it came about (replacement FW for horrible Archos players), but why would you put it on an iPod?
Also, I've never had any problems with any of my iPods. When I tried out rockbox, it would hang whenever I tried to generate the database. I promptly wiped it. Maybe the developers should think about fixing some of the bugs before they add more useless crap to the features list.
Yeah, they really care about Rockbox. That's why they encrypted the firmware. Right. It has nothing to do with people trying to crack Fairplay, pirate iPhone applications, and hack/clone/jailbreak the iPhone. Seriously, dude. There are about a million reasons why Apple would want to protect its products from hacking, and I seriously doubt Rockbox is anywhere on that list. Seriously, the DIY Altoids-can MP3 players are more of a competitive threat to apple than Rockbox.