woes of an iPod owner

i have an iPod. and i meant iPod, not iPhone or iPad, but what's the difference really? iPhone is an iPod that can make calls while an iPad is an iPod magnified ten times so the oldies and people with chubby fingers can use it easily. but i digress. what i was saying was, i have an iPod which is somewhat old - like close to 18 months or so, and it had an earlier, not so fancy operating system running on it. still i liked it - the touch system is, well, sexy and the sound quality is really good. plus you can play shitload of games on it and read a lot of books. so, to and from work yours truly can usually be seen listening to something while reading a book on it. but for all its coolness, sometimes iPod sucks. i mean it's so sophisticated but you can't do multitasking on it. if you were reading a book and you want to change the song you are listening to you have to exit the book and go to music. or else, if the iPod screen is off, to change the song you have to slide unlock it and change the song. time and again i wished they had simple next/previous buttons, but seems it's not an option in a touch screen device. or they seem to think that way.

then, in the later operating systems they have this cool 'shake' feature. if you need to change the song you just give it a gentle shake and it goes to the next item in the play list. wow, i thought. there ends all my problems and the iPod achieves perfection. now all i have to do is buy the newest os and shake shake and shake. read and shake. shake is all i have to do. the iPod i mean. so i spent the few bucks they wanted me to and got the new os.

the next day i was on the train listening to something while reading a book. then after a while britney started singing so i gave it a shake. the iPod i mean. nothing. i gave it another shake, a bit harder this time. still nothing. wtf! third one was a pretty violent shake and still it is bluntly refusing to shuffle. this was a couple of months back, during the winter where you wear winter jackets and your hands are in your pockets at all times. so i guess shaking your hands inside your pockets must not have looked... right. couple of japs near me moving away suggested this so i took the fella out (i mean the iPod) and unlocked it by sliding. and gave it a gentle shake again and voila, it shuffles! i wasn't sure whether i should cry or laugh. if you add a shaking feature so that we don't have to use the screen, but in order for it to work we have to use the screen to unlock the device, it kind of defeats the purpose i guess.

good job steve jobs. maybe you should change your name to steve job.