waffle

Cool:

• That it is small.
• That Apple’s speech synthesis now does a passable Swedish voice.

Not so very:

• That you, too, can now get the unfettered Stephen Hawking-grade UI experience.
• That you are now confined to the Apple headphones (there’s a good model… which costs as much as the iPod shuffle itself) unless you want to give up the menu and the song controls (beyond random/order/off). Which considering the menu may not actually be that big of a loss.

I kid. Mostly. If you snatch a music player below $79, you’re not normally going to buy decent headphones for it, and I guess having a menu with playlists is a step forward. It reeks of “jesus, it’s only one button!” syndrome, but most people won’t use the menu anyway, and it’s small enough and cheap enough to get away with it.

Moreover, I advise that the iPhone software platform must be opened.