Issues with our iPod Shuffle

At this time my wife took her shuffle "on the road" for the first time. A journey to New York city (about an 80 minute train ride). She loaded up another 4 CDs before leaving. She now has about 140 songs on the shuffle. She was excited to use it and still marveled at home small/light the device is. However, after an hour into the ride the unit just stopped. At first she thought it was a gap before the next song would start to play. She hit the play/pause button....nothing. She pressed the Battery Indicator light....nothing. She turned it off and then pressed the battery indicator light....nothing. Then she turned to me and said "This stupid thing isn't working." I looked at it turned it on and it began to play again (but not at the same point the unit stopped). It worked for another 20 minutes and stopped again. She was disgusted and decided to take a nap...thinking the battery died (even though she charged it before leaving and the indicator light was at maximum)

Next Day (after charging it overnight) she began using it again. Within 45 minutes the unit stopped working. Same symptoms as before. Now the kicker here for me is I was told by her "This is my device and I don't want you messing with it. I'll never learn how to use it if you do everything." So now when asked "Why isn't this working. I think it is defective" I had to say "What does the manual say about troubleshooting?" The response of "I don't know. I don't have time for this" was to be expected. I can't blame her...the device is supposed to be pretty simple to use. So later that night I "broke the law" and acquired her manual to the device to read the troubleshooting section. Sure enough there was a catch all listed that instructed you how to reset the device (turn off for 5 seconds and then turn on) and "If that doesn’t work, you may need to restore iPod shuffle software." Great...just great. I then went to Apple's support forums and luckily(?!) found others having the same problem. Most people said the 5 second power off seemed to do the trick but others stated that it didn't fix it. (Now while I was online I was listening to the shuffle hoping that I could re-create the issue my wife had so I could put an SOS out there....needless to say the unit behaved fine for the entire time I was using it.)

I thought it would be silly to restore the shuffle from the software that shipped with it since my wife did that not to long ago. Talk about the alignments of the planets the following update is announced by Apple.

iPod Updater 2005-02-22, which includes updated versions of the software for use with various iPod models. According to the release notes, the update includes new software for the iPod mini (v1.3), iPod with Dock Connector (v2.3), iPod shuffle (v1.1), and iPod with Touch Wheel or Scroll Wheel (v1.5).

The iPod shuffle software update adds support for the iPod shuffle Battery Pack and offers "increased software stability."

So I downloaded the update (after telling my wife what I found out and what I wanted to try) and applied it. (to her shuffle and my 20GB 3rd Generation iPod). I'm hoping this addresses her problem. If not, I think I'll buy her an iPod mini since they just dropped the price of the 4GB model to $199 (versus the $149 shuffle). For the additional $50 one would get 4 times the capacity, a display and choice of color.