I own an ipod shuffle Mp3 player. It is a great mp3 player because it is affordable and very light weight, and charges from the USB port. You can eaily slip into your pocket or even let it hanging. The philosophy of shuffle is to listen to randomly selected songs. The mp3 player does not have elaborate buttons menus to allow you to select which song to play. There are only 2 mode of play which is set by a button on the back.

1)Sequential: The songs are played in a sequential mode. One can forward or reverese one step at a time with the forware and backward button.
2)Shuffle: In this mode the mp3 player chooses a random song from the ones
downloaded. The desktop allows you to give star ranking to songs and shuffle can be programmed to pick songs which have a higher star ranking more often.

The shuffle comes with iTunes software, which allows you to organise your mp3 or cd songs and download to the shuffle (when it is connected). The software allows you to categorise, and assign star (5 to 1) rankings to the songs. One can download favourite categories to the shuffle.

I fully charged shuffle can go for 4 or 5 hours.

I would recommend buying a shuffle dock station because it is hard to fit the shuffle on my laptop usb port without taking out the power cord of the laptop. With shuffle docking station it give more room.