Apple iPod Shuffle G2 Review [Apple]

Necessary Evil?

Sansa, the undisputed number 2 in the MP3 market with a decisive 11% market share as of May this year, announced the new Sansa Clip.  This piece of MP3 goodness is every bit as functional as the Nano but in the size of a shuffle.

This device really gives you the best bang for your holiday, economic depression, buck.  It's standard 8GB memory is 4 times larger than the largest shuffle.  It includes an OLED screen, built-in FM tuner (really, why is this even important), but retails for $30 more than the 2GB shuffle.  This device is certainly very attractive but the biggest hurdle these manufactures have isn't how nice their player is, but it's the software that makes all the difference.

The iPod isn't a great MP3 player and never has been.  Its interface however, is still the best I've used since MP3 players became popular.  Not to mention that iTunes, while not the best music management software, has become so integral in people's digital music life that it's hard to use anything but iTunes.
For the short time I had other players, it was nice to have extra features and better hardware than the competing iPod, but I missed the syncing and ease of use iTunes provided.  If you give in to Apple and just let it manage everything for you and forget the DRM issues, you will have a great experience.  Which I'm finding to be the truth with most Apple products.  They are the Passive Aggressive gurus of tech.
However, I had previously tried out the shuffle thinking that I can use it at the gym while having it sync with my iTunes library.  But for some reason, I couldn't have it sync just Podcasts and when I had it sync a smart playlist of just Podcasts, I couldn't specify which ones only.  It was broken unless you wanted just music and again, let Apple control it for you.  If this Sansa Clip lets you intelligently sync with your iTunes music, without using iTunes, I may consider it.  But what's going to kill it for me anyway is that the meta data of play count/played status/ratings, won't be synced back since that's an iTunes thing.  So I'm not going to be able to tell iTunes automatically that I already listened to the latest episode of TWiT.
For now, I think I'll just stick to my armband case and iPhone for the gym.