IPod Mini
The first generation:
Back in 2004, in the cold months of January, Apple introduced another of their gadgets to the market. This was a direct competition. The Mini pods had similar features to the first gadget, yet the gadget lacked in areas of support from accessories coming from third parties. The first pod has diminutive displaying, since it was limited to the screens tracking ID to title and artist exclusively. It did not recognize the albums rather. The Ipod is similar to all other pods created, i.e. it would connect to a computer through a 2.0 USB cable for charging. You also got around 4 gigabytes of storage for songs, movies, games, data and so on.

The Mini device became the first generation gadget, yet it was found outrageously priced so it only survived a short time on the market. The mini was taken off the market in the months of September and in the year 2005. Nano replaced the Mini, yet this device while still expensive was a large percentage smaller than the older version of Ipods.

Mini made noticeable the clicking wheels with the newer version, which took the place of the older Ipods, yet it was sensitive to the touch, which meant that the owner use his fingers to highlight areas within the windowpane while selecting an option from the screen. The owner had to press on the wheel, pressing down to activate the commands.

You could purchase the pod in several different colors. The Silver pod model was one of the top sellers, while the gold version sold fewer copies.

The Mini Second-generation Pod
In the early months of the start of 2005, the Mini became the 2nd generation pod announced to the world. This innovative device held 6 gigabytes (GB), and cost around $250. The memory or hard drive was larger than the prior version, which only held four gigs on its drive and cost around $200. The difference was slight as for the battery power, since both copies would last eighteen hours before recharging was needed. The Mini had an enhanced color, yet it did not have an AC power adaptor as the first pod did. The FireWire was also excluded in this deal. This later brought a discontinuance of the pod.

IPod shuffle:
The Shuffle pod was made available in 2005 shortly after the discontinuance of the 2nd mini pod. The Shuffle included flash memory instead of the common hard drive, which perked the interest of computer manufacturers who wondered if flash memory would not take the place of hard drives within computers. Shuffle offered a couple of models with one offering a gigabyte (GB) of memory and the other offering only 512 Megabytes (MB). The 512 would hold a little over a hundred songs, while the one gig would hold a little over 200 songs. Shuffle however would not work with AIFF encodes, or Lossless files on audio. The lack of process power is probably the reason this did not work for this device. Still, the Shuffle pod was said to offer better sounds quality than other pods produced.

The Shuffle pod furthermore had limited selections or features since it had nil screen. This left navigation dissimilar in contrast since the tracks were only played in order that was set by the user, or else through random selection. The user would use I-Tunes program to set the music through random processing in the Library area. The music was set for each time the Shuffle pod was connected via USB to the computer.

Shuffle pod weighed few pounds than the later models, weighing less than 8 ounces. The size of the Shuffle weighed about the same as a package of gum. Similar to all other models however, Shuffle could function properly by using a Universal Serial Bus (USB) storage mass connector. The price of this device was slightly lower than other pods offered on the marketplace.