Date: 2008-11-02 11:52:02 Created: null
Three days of Shuffle usage and counting. I think this is working out nicely for me. When I really can't do anything to choose songs I just drop all the nomal thoughts about what to listen to, hit play and get on with my life. And I love the size and design of it, it's equally nice to hold and play with it as it is to just clip it away somewhere and forget about it.
I haven't yet started to tell myself that the shuffle function reads my mind and picks songs based on mood. I'm afraid I know too much about statistics and the human mind for that to happen, but you never know. It feels like it picks a lot of rarely played stuff, but that's pretty darn expected when you put even the least amount of thought into the matter. More than one fourth of my music collection hasn't been played in the past six months, and I'm sure there is a sharp drop between relatively few regularly played things and everything else. Just more proof the choice is random, in short.
It's been a while longer now, and I say we get along pretty well. I bring it along just about every day and re-fill it with random songs every few days.
One little annoyance I've discovered is that the Shuffle doesn't seem to keep track of when you play the songs. Perhaps it skips all stats? I've only noticed it with the timestamp for last played, because when I sync with iTunes all the songs the Shuffle have played since the last sync will have their "last played"-time set to the time of the sync. Seventy songs played in the span of one minute, and without skipping, is efficient use of time indeed.
I'm hopeful that it's a bug either in iTunes or the Shuffle firmware, so that it can and will be fixed.
Apart from that it would be nice if the battery lasted longer, but I don't feel I can really complain about it.
(Especially since I haven't done any timing tests at all.)
Anyway, I don't think I'm getting twelve hours out of it, and definitely not the even higher numbers some review I read reported. But mileage probably varies a great deal.
I also want to mention that the Shuffle is fiddle-friendly to an enormous degree. The smooth, and often slightly cool, metal, solid feel and the clip are a perfect combination for something to fiddle with when your hands need a bit of distraction.
Clip.
Unclip.
Slide fingers over surface.
Clip around finger.
And so on.
Nope, definitely not anywhere near 12 hours of battery time. Today I got about four hours of continuous playtime, after the Shuffle had been played until it turned off from low power on Friday and then being docked the whole intervening time. I'm wondering what goes on when the Shuffle is docked but not actually recieving power. I recall the manual saying something diffuse like "some Macs provide power to their USB ports while sleeping", so I wonder what the rest do? Does the Shuffle drain quicker when connected but not actually recieving power?
Also, how much, if anything, might/shoud headphone size affect battery life?
The little questions of a modern mobile lifestyle ...
Last night I surfed into Apple's support pages and discovered the tech support chat feature. I decided to see if they had anything interesting to say about my Shuffle's battery life so I entered my details and connected. It worked right away, and I had a chat with a support guy going before I could say "restore to factory settings and let it charge until the lights indicate full charge, making sure the computer doesn't go to sleep, then see if the battery life is any better".
I never even said that, that's what he said to me. He also said that if it didn't improve I'd get a new Shuffle, and I got assigned a case number to refer to as well. It all sounded ... well, sound to me, so I restored it to factory settings, turned off Aura's auto-sleep and went to bed. When I got up the light was shining a merry green, so I started listening at 07:00 and have yet to run out of battery as of 16:50. Seems it giving it a new start did the trick.
I never ran out of battery. I listened to 23:10, then I got tired and went to bed instead. Battery status still indicated that the battery was ten to thirty percent full, so I wouldn't be surprised if it had another hour in it.
Today it's fully charged and playing again. But quite certainly as uninterrupted as it did yesterday ...