Product Reviews

Small but perfectly formed, the iPod Shuffle has the clean, good looks that we've come to expect from Apple's range of portable music players. So it comes as no surprise to learn that the Shuffle is also as intuitive to use, both in your pocket and when you're synching it with Apple's iTunes media player software.

It has the same decent sound quality as its bigger brothers, but is designed to be used in a completely different way. Instead of storing your entire music collection, the Shuffle is being marketed as the ultimate playlist. Once you've dragged and dropped up to 240 (if you have the 1GB model) tracks from iTunes, you can either play them in order or randomly. The Shuffle's lack of a display means that you won't be able to skip to a particular song, but as you've cherry-picked the tracks yourself anyway you probably won't need to.

If you're the kind of person who has a massive CD collection and likes to play albums to suit your every mood, the Shuffle isn't for you. But if you simply want an affordable, dinky player that's easy to use, looks good and can play both AAC and MP3 files, it's very good value.