The BLiNDpod

I have had an iPod Shuffle, or as I call it the "BLiNDpod", since April of this year and I feel that I should tell you a little bit about it. It looked like a great addition to the other iPods, until you really got to experience it. I must admit that it is better than nothing, although it is worse than anything else. Next year, it is said that a new version of the Shuffle will come out. Being as small as a stick of gum, and coming in a variety of colors, including the newly introduced black. This is kind of cool in all, but it is still a shuffle, and that is where it falls short... The shuffle is completely operational, to it's fullest extent. There is not a screen on it! That leads to many problems, but more on that later. There are only three modes...
PLAYLIST mode: Songs play in the order in which you arranged them on the computer. There is nothing to it, it plays ABC or 123. Nothing new here...
SHUFFLE mode: Songs play in a random order. This is good if you only want to listen to any song on the playlist and you don't really care. If you want to listen to a specific song, you probably won't find it here.
OFF mode: This is probably one of the best modes, it has to be in atleast the top three in my opinion. Songs don't play at all.
Anyways, there isn't a screen. This is a big problem because if you actually want to listen to one specific song, you must go to playlist mode and click the "next song" button a lot, or go to random mode and hope that you can get close, then switch to playlist mode and go on from there. For example, I have my songs listed in alphabetical order according to the artist name. In order to get to any Def Leppard song, I would have to start at the beginning of the playlist and press the "next song" button 50 times before getting there. And you can't just click this button that many times, because you have to wait until the song actually starts before you can proceed. This meaning that if you went to the next song, it would delay for a few seconds, within that time you could have pressed the button a few more times, although the delay makes the extra clicks irrelevant, as for it is lost within the transaction towards the next song. With a screen you could merely scroll through the artists and the songs and be there in a matter of seconds. This is especially of importance when you want to listen to a podcast. Podcasts have different effects on you than songs do. Podcasts are things that you would normally just listened to once, then disposed of, while songs will normally be listened to time and time again. This is evidence that podcasts have a different effect than songs do on people, so in this sense, you can be in the mood for songs or in the mood for podcasts. Therefor, if you have anything, I can't really recomend the BLiNDpod, but if you don't and you don't want any podcasts, it couldn't hurt. It is not expensive and it is small, so it can be lost easily, although it can comfortably fit anywhere.