JISHOU, HUNAN — I said goodbye to my iPod Shuffle today. I ditched it for a Chinese-made iPod lookalike, the Meizu Media Card.
It’s on the right here. Click on the image to get a better view. 
The battery on the real iPod, a first-gen 512 MB Shuffle, became incontinent and just couldn’t seem to hold a charge much longer than a few hours. I’d charge it up at night, and by morning the little fella was flat as a pancake. No lights, no music, nada.
So, two freshmen (YangQiu-Harry and GaoXing-Happy) helped me rejoin the iPod generation. We visited a shop downtown where Harry had bought his mp4 player. I didn’t want a player with video capabilities; my eyes want a larger screen. So we checked out the mp3 players.
I settled on a 2G unit by Meizu. It’s about the same size as a Nano, but without the trademark Apple touchwheel. Cost (with wall charger and gel cover): ¥399 or about $58. (Harry talked the sales staff to throw in the charger and cover for free.)
The Media Card does all I want it to, so I’m pleased. I had my Chinese language course on the iPod, so once it went south, I was again attached to my laptop to study Chinese. Not so much fun, or convenient.
Out of the box, the Meizu is plug-and-play with Windows, but I use Ubuntu. It took a bit of poking around the toobs to figure out why Ubuntu was not detecting the Meizu, even though it should.
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