The iPod shuffle intrigues me as a companion to my HDD mp3 player but I have one important question:

If you put a couple of albums onto it and while in shuffle mode you get to a song that is on one of them, if you switch to play-in-order mode, are you at the position where that song is on the album? This would allow for a basic kind of navigation (a random one) so that while you may mostly listen to your songs in random, you can also find a CD you want and listen to it quickly enough instead of having to skip 100+ songs to get to it. Or if you get an urge to hear the album after hearing the song, you can do so quite easily. I haven't read exactly how the interchange between shuffle and play-in-order works, but I would think that this is how it works.

Just for fun, assuming an average album or playlist is 10 songs (it's probably more), this would mean that you have a 1/12 chance of finding the album/playlist you want by skipping forward a track in shuffle mode with the 512 MB unit (each succesive click makes the chance a bit higher). Including the song you start at, after 5 clicks,you have had a bit over 50% chance of finding it, and after 11, by all probability you've found it (assuming my math is correct). This isn't too efficient, but unless the album/playlist is the first or second one added, it's better than skipping tracks from the beginning. The probabilities go up if you're using higher bit-rates of course.

Of course, this would all be pointless if Apple had just included a function that could skip 10 tracks at once, but I don't think they have?