Plaidophile

So, of course people are a bit atwitter with the news of the new iPod Shuffle. Personally I'm surprised it took them this long to add VoiceOver to the Shuffle. The actual device's form factor is too small; I have a hard enough time keeping track of my many 4GB USB thumb drives which are much larger than it. And it doesn't seem like it was actually necessary for them to remove the controls from the device itself, considering how small the buttons are on the inline headphone controller thing. I expect to see third-party "sleeves" for it soon which bulk up the device and add playback controls back to the device itself (via the headphone jack).

Meanwhile, the main odd thing about VoiceOver appears to have all the text pre-rendered by the sync PC; on the overview video, they mention that the voice is different for Macs and PCs. Considering the old 68K Macs had a speech synthesizer in a tiny amount of space and CPU, it's a bit surprising that they'd add time to the sync process instead of just putting the speech synthesizer on the player itself (not to mention all the storage space that likely wastes). Very odd.

The less-odd but still pretty odd thing is that they're making a big deal about how it's "the first mp3 player that talks to you" even though the current iPod Nano and Classic already did that.