Daniel Nouri's Old Blog

My iPod shuffle recently broke completely, a couple of days after the warranty had expired. I'm a bit angry I had to trash it so early. Apparently, I'm not the only one having trouble with the iPod shuffle. Also, while trying to get support for my problem I've found that Apple's customer service sucks.

So, I needed to replace the iPod with something else. I noticed that they were dumping the same shuffle model that I had (first generation) at the electronics store for 30 EUR. I resisted, and went for the somewhat similar Samsung YP-U2 for 70 EUR.

And the Samsung is really nice so far:

• it has a display with very useful configuration options, unlike the shuffle,
• it has a nice equalizer with many presets, unlike the shuffle,
• it's a USB mass storage device that lets you drop your music right in, unlike the shuffle, which requires you to jump through hoops to have transfer of music working without using iTunes,
• it's got USB that you can directly plug in, no need for an adapter, like with the shuffle,
• it supports Ogg Vorbis, unlike the shuffle. Although I've kinda given up on Vorbis quite a while ago after realizing that my MP3 player back then wouldn't support it, it's nice to see that Samsung apparently cares and supports this free format.