A
pple arrived fashionably late to the MP3 party,
but blew away the competition with its easy-to-
use, elegant iPod. Can Jobs & Co. work the same
magic with a fl ash memory-based player? We comparetwo 1GB MP3 players—the iPod Shuffl e and its closest
competitor, Creative’s MuVo Micro N200, in order to, as
Apple puts it, “give chance a chance.”
—LOGAN DECKERi P O D S H U F F L E
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T H I S M O N T H : Mini Flash MP3 Players
Sound quality
In our tests, both players delivered
equally good sound without clipping
either end of our tracks, but the Shuffl e
gets much louder than the MuVo (one
editor described the maximum volume
as “terrifying”), and the headphones
are the best you’ll get bundled with a
fl ash memory-based player (although
we still recommend springing for
a better set to improve overall
sound quality). Sadly, however, the
screen-less Shuffl e has no facility for
equalization. Winner: ShuffleMA XIMUMPC JUNE 2005
Lightweight, dashing, nicely designed control ring,
and loud as hell.SHUFFLEBOARDSHUFFLE PLAY
No screen. So-so battery life. No screen. No play-
list support. No screen.
$150, http://www.apple.comMA XIMUMPCVERDICT 7
Features
Other than its ability to act as a
removable hard drive through Windows
Explorer, the iPod Shuffl e is—either
by default or by design—pretty much
feature-free. No playlists. No EQ. No FM
tuner. No voice recording. Surprisingly,
the Shuffl e also omits support for
tracks encoded with the Apple Lossless
Encoder. But damn if it doesn’t look
good. Winner: MuVo—by a mileBattery life
Apple seems to have been a little
modest with the rated battery life of
12 hours—we got more than 15 hours
of continuous play from the Shuffl e at
75 percent volume. But that’s still not
as good as the MuVo. Sorry, Charlie.
Winner: MuVoSoftware
Well, no contest here. iTunes is the
best MP3 playback software available
for Windows, and it can be confi gured
to fi ll your iPod Shuffl e either randomly
or from specifi c playlists, and you can
even give preference to tracks that
you rate higher than others. Winner:
Shuffle—by a mileEase of use
The Shuffl e’s lack of an LCD screen forced Apple into
design compromises that no amount of marketing
spin can make up for. The only source of feedback
comes from two LEDs, one on the front, and one on
back, and Apple seems to admit defeat by including a
wallet card to help you decode the light signals. And,
of course, you can’t see what track you’re listening to
or visually scroll through your music. Too spartan for
our tastes. Winner: MuVoPlays: AAC (including protected iTunes tracks), MP3, WAVactual size