Like all MP3 players iPod shuffle comes with a pair of headphones, shown on Figure 11. Its quality is better than most headphones that come bundled with MP3 players, but depending on how picky you are about headphone quality or depending on the shape of your ears maybe you will want to buy a better set.

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Figure 11: Headphones that come with iPod shuffle.

As you have already notice by now iPod shuffle comes with a clip attached to it, which is a really convenient feature, especially if you are doing some kind of exercise while using it.

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Figure 12: iPod shuffle’s clip.

Using iPod shuffle is really easy since it doesn’t have many buttons. Just turn it on, press play and that’s it! If you turn it off it will resume the song that was playing at the same exact point when you turn in back on.

Audio quality is great, but it depends more on the quality of your audio files than on the player itself. We were particularly impressed by the response of the bass sounds; we thought that since this unit doesn’t have a user-selectable equalizer it would have bad response on this frequency range, which wasn’t the case.

Maximum volume level is more than satisfactory and should please the guys that are in line to become deaf, but audio gets a little bit distorted when iPod shuffle is playing music at its maximum output level.

The only problem we had was if we left iPod shuffle connected to its dock station while we turned on our computer, the system would freeze during memory testing. We don’t know if this is a specific problem with the motherboard we were using (Gigabyte GA-P35C-DS3R), a bad configuration on the motherboard setup that we couldn’t locate or a problem with iPod shuffle. So if you face a similar problem just remove your iPod from its docking station before turning on your computer.