Music Ally

Apple sprang a surprise this morning by announcing AND putting on sale a new iPod Shuffle. It’s half the size of the previous model (which was already pretty small), but its big new thing is… it talks to you.

Eh? The feature is called VoiceOver, and basically means the device can speak your song titles, artists and playlist names. Apple seems pretty keen on the usefulness of this feature, judging by iPod/iPhone product marketing VP Greg Joswiak’s comments:

“Imagine your music player talking to you, telling you your song titles, artists and playlist names. The amazingly small new iPod shuffle takes a revolutionary approach to how you listen to your music by talking to you, also making it the first iPod shuffle with playlists.”

We’re not sure users have been crying out for this, but still. We wonder if VoiceOver will make it into other iPods and iPhone in the future. 14 languages are supported too, including Czech, Turkish and Mandarin Chinese as well as the ones you’d expect.

The device is available now in silver or black, has 4GB of memory, and costs £59 here in the UK.

Tags: apple, ipod shuffle

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 11th, 2009 at 2:14 pm and is filed under Gadgets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.