Davey Winder
Wednesday, 11 March 2009 19:03
Your IT -
Entertainment
As if an iPod does not do enough already, someone at Apple obviously thought it was missing the ability to talk. But not any more.
Apple has been hitting the new product announcement button rather a lot
of late. There were those
way too expensive for some Mac mini, iMac and Mac Pro
updates for example.
There was also the
much better received new Safari 4 web browser.
And now for something completely different which is sure to get
everyone talking, including the product itself: the iPod shuffle finds
its voice.
Yep, Apple has just
announced the new
iPod shuffle. Available immediately, according to Apple it is the
smallest music player on the planet at just 1.8" tall and 0.3" thin.
The design team achieved this tiny miracle by relocating the controls
from the shuffle to the earbud cord, which you will either find really
cool or really annoying I guess. I'm in the cool camp, as the cord
controls are now where they always should have been.
Another cool or fool contender is the VoiceOver functionality which is
the real star of this particular Apple launch in my opinion. Here's
why: if you are listening to a song and want to know the title or
artist the iPod will now dip the music volume and tell you.
What's more, it will tell you when your battery is about to go kaput
and what the names of your playlists are making it a breeze to switch
between multiple lists without looking at the shuffle itself.
Want to hear your shuffle tell you a song name in French? No problem,
this thing is multi-lingual and can speak fluently in no less than 14
languages. In fact, the iPod will select the most suitable language for
the track being played using intelligent algorithms.
When it recognises a Spanish artist and song, it speaks Spanish. Your
iPod doing foreign language accents, how cool is that? If your answer
is not cool at all, then you can simply tell it to speak English all
the time.
The new 4GB speaking shuffle costs £59 here in the UK where I am based,
your price mileage may vary depending upon your location.