Okay, so I still had hopes that the Treo would improve the situation. It did, but only slightly. The Missing Sync memory card mounting was stable. The sync was quicker. All the other problems remained, and one or two new ones arrived. The iTunes connectivity was more stable, but it would inexplicably truncate some songs when copying them. Besides that, we're still not talking automatic music sync - manual management only. Until I bought either the special headphone adapter or the special combo headset/stereo headphones ($20), I couldn't listen in stereo. The standard headset was one ear, and it was one stereo channel - not mono - so it was even more annoying. Without a dedicated MP3 circuit, playing music in the background was fine due to the faster CPU, but not good when you tried to use the camera.
I had gotten the free 128MB SD card that PalmOne offered to compensate for the inefficient memory scheme, and so that was only giving me a 30 song or less capacity, which was not great. I tried using it for bike riding for a while. In order to protect the phone, I put it in my frame bag below my seat, but that meant I had to pull it out just to skip songs. It worked pretty good otherwise, and I could take calls that I never got anyway. But, the other annoyances were really telling me this was not suitable for me other than maybe for walking. I decided that I didn't need to be able to take calls at any moment, so I could just keep the phone in a bag. I would leave the music off the Treo and got an iPod shuffle. This did mean I was adding a device, but I had just gotten rid of one, and the shuffle is by no means big. Also, I wouldn't be carrying the music player with me as much as I did my phone and PDA, so normally I still only have one device.
The iPod shuffle is a wonderful little thing. It still has the problem of any personal music player with the dangling headphone wires. It nicely solves several problems: it plays iTunes music store songs without any mucking about, you don't have to turn it back on or switch to the music player app to operate he controls, it doesn't slow down my PDA, it syncs with (no manual file copying) iTunes very well, it syncs quickly, and it holds 120 songs. Well, I could have bought a 512MB SD card for the Treo to store that many, but I'd also need that $20 stereo headset, and that totaled most of the price of the iPod shuffle. Besides, the shuffle makes for conversation whereas an SD card just isn't sexy no matter how good a deal you got on it.
The shuffle is very light and small, so you have more options of where to put it to keep it safe. Normally, I can just keep it under my shirt with the lanyard with just the headphone buds coming out. I got DV Forge's "The Clips" for it
, and I'm liking them. The pin cap is my favorite because I can pin the shuffle to the outside of my shirt where it won't get sweaty or swing around. As with any of the three clips, they remove the extra cord mess the lanyard has. The controls are great except for the mode switch on the back. Since that has 3 positions (off, ordered play, shuffle play), the middle one suffers from being hard to select. This is also made more difficult since the slider button is hard to grip. If it were just made with some ribs, it would be better. It's made with an unpolished surface to make it grippier than the rest of the shuffle's polished body, but it often isn't enough. However, since it goes to sleep to manage power, you don't turn it on and off with the switch that much.
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