03-13-08 - 2

The iPod Shuffle is such a shitty product. For one thing, the physical design of the buttons is retarded. It's this cute looking circle, which I guess is intended to mimic the look of the normal ipod wheel thing, but it's not a wheel it's just 4 buttons. The consequence of the circle is that it's rotationally symmetric so you can't tell what you're touching and it makes it really hard to hit buttons by touch. A correct design would be to just have four buttons with distinct shapes, like the Playstation control buttons.

Furthermore, the software/firmware is shit. You should be able to set up playlists that choose a subset of the songs, and then select between the playlists. This could easily be done with no additional buttons, just a shift-click or something like that. Also the sequential play mode is a pain because you have to just skip through a ton of songs, but if there was a "skip album" shift-click it would be pretty useable.