Apple's new iPod Shuffle

Now Apple's new iPod can talk to you, telling you your song titles, artists and playlist names. Interesting that it's taken three generations of the iPod shuffle to arrive at this place: when the idea of a really small Flash-based player was first mooted, people said Apple wouldn't be able to do it with a small enough screen. So they didn't. Do the screen, that is.How then do you know what song's playing? Apple somehow persuaded people that you didn't need to. You filled it up and then had a load of songs which you put on, yes, "shuffle".
But technology moves on, and rather as Apple dissed the idea of video players before introducing the video-playing iPod, here's the equivalent of a screen for you. The new version has 4GB of storage (enough for the fabled "1,000 songs") plus an intriguing feature called "VoiceOver" - which has a computer-generated voice - male on the Mac, female on Windows, "Comic Book Guy" on Linux.
This also creates the possibilities of creating playlists . What's interesting about this is twofold: it indicates that Apple is thinking "beyond the screen", to audio feedback which it had already on the iPod nano; and it shows how far storage prices have fallen. The 4GB (only) shuffle, all Flash-based, costs $79; the 5GB original iPod cost $399, and used a hard drive. Plus there's the fact that speaking interfaces are getting increasingly popular: first the Kindle, now the iPod shuffle. OK, you wouldn't want to have a book read to you in its computer-generated voice.