Could it be more bad news for Zune? Whilst Zune has busy keeping the portable flash media player market competitive with the 4 and 8 gig Zune (against their main rival the iPod Nano), Apple have unleashed their third generation model of the ultraportable and screenless iPod Shuffle. This latest miniscule beast comes only in the 4GB variety, and is physically tiny compared to the Nano and the flash Zunes, and even the previous Shuffle model!

Of course downsizing technology is usually a good thing, but are Apple moving in the right direction with their latest attempt? Does Microsoft really have anything to be worrying about here? Small is good, but this is kind-of ridiculous now. What you’ve got here is a player so small that even the most careful person could end up unwittingly misplacing it and never finding it again.

Or course, one of the more obvious downsides of this tiny factor form is that Apple have decided to remove all buttons from the device, entirely! Yep, that’s right, this thing has no buttons. (Well not on the body at least, there are 3 buttons on the headphones though I’ll get on to that in a minute)

To combat the lack of a screen, Apple have implemented a new feature called “VoiceOver”, in what it is calling its automated voice within the Shuffle, which lets you know what album, artist, song and playlist your listening to. Now, from my point of view, that would get very annoying, listening to songs with an automated voice riddles off before every song. It also takes a few precious seconds off you’re songs before you listen to them, and there doesn’t seem to be anyway to turn them off. Surely if you’re going out to buy a Shuffle you really don’t really care to be told what’s playing anyway? The quality of the voice itself is also debatable. On the latest Mac OSX system’s its uses Apple’s new, and extremely pleasant text-voice engine, but on PC’s it leaves you with a far less desirable, more robotic voice. it’s also worth noting that this will slow down iTunes even more when adding music these Voice Overs are generated on your home PC, not on the device.

Perhaps the biggest sin with this new device though is the aforementioned headphones. As it stands the only controls to use the player are on the headphones. And the headphones Apple ship with the device, are as usual, of poor bogstandard quality. And you can’t even use your own headphones with the device unless you wish to for go all control of it altogether, which for a music player, is not good practice to say the least. So you’ll have to buy new headphones specifically for the device. And get this, for manufacturers to make headphones for the device with the button controls on, they have to pay for a license from Apple to use the control chip. So basically Apple is now Taxing headphones on their devices. If Microsoft ever tried to pull off something like this, antitrust cases would be flying around the room in seconds.

Then you have the utterly ridiculous control scheme. Of the 3 buttons available, 2 are for volume control. That leaves you with one button to play songs, fast forward, rewind, stop, turn off the device, skip a song, etc. This is also achieved by pressing the main button several times depending on which operation you’ll want to use, meaning you’re actually going to have to read the manual to use this thing!

This is quite possibly one of the most ill-conceived ideas Apple has ever put out on the market, and maybe this will get some more people into looking at a different product, say a Zune? Anyway, with rumblings of a new Zune line-up scheduled for unveiling this Summer, hopefully Microsoft can achieve something more practical and steal some of Apple’s potential (and maybe disgruntled) customers.