While we weren’t particularly fond of the new device controls, we were impressed by the new VoiceOver feature, which in effect, turns the shuffle into a talking iPod. You press and hold the center button to hear the title and artist of the song that is playing. In our testing, the VoiceOver feature worked seamlessly. Although the voice was a bit robotic, it even recognized and correctly pronounced songs in foreign languages. In fact, Voice Over speaks an impressive number of languages including Chinese (Mandarin), Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish.

The quality of the voice actually depends on your operating system. The voice used by Mac OS X Leopard is excellent. When using Windows, the device used the iTunes VoiceOverKit which is good, but not quite as good as the voice built into Leopard.

Although a talking device that can announce the song and artist is notable, the most useful feature of VoiceOver  is that it allows the shuffle to support the use of playlists.  If you press and hold the center button and release after you hear a tone, the device will announce the playlists that are on the device. When you hear the name of the playlist you want you click the same button to select it. This makes this version of the shuffle much more useful than previous versions.

The VoiceOver and the use of playlists allows you to listen to different music for different activities or to suite different moods. This control over your music was unavailable in previous shuffles. And it makes an inexpensive and  screen-less device like the shuffle much more useful. Because you have more control over your music, you will also appreciate the fact that this shuffle has a 4 GB flash drive that holds up to 1,000 songs in 128 Kbps AAC format.

The VoiceOver is also used for information and alerts. If you try to use your shuffle before you put any music on it, it will say, “Please use iTunes to sync music.” It will also give you battery low alerts.

Like other iPods, the battery is built-in and can only be factory replaced. It does, however, last for about 10 hours which will give you a full day of listening.

Since this shuffle only has a headphone port, you will be limited to the type of external speakers like home stereo speakers or FM-transmitters that you can attach. Although we were able to use an in-car system like Griffin’s iTrip Auto Universal Plus but attaching any external speakers that are not made specifically for the shuffle will give you limited control of the player while it is attached to the speakers.

Like other iPods, audio quality is great. Even without a user-selectable equalizer, the bass sounds are excellent. In fact, given the miniscule size of the device, the crisp and clear sound quality is amazing.