arrived this morning; love it.
i pre-ordered mine at the beginning of october, and got it this morning (engraving and all--wow, small engraving font!). very positive first impression.
i can see why some people complain about the clip at first: you expect it to be like a binder clip. i think apple's design is actually fine. there's a decent amount of force when the clip is wide open, and then when it's almost closed there's less force, the majority of its fastening power being supplied by the overlapping "teeth." for its intended use--clipping to clothes--i think it's great. whether it will clip successfully to other materials i think depends on the thickness (thicker is better up to a quarter inch or so), pliability (so the teeth can catch some material), and whether there is a thicker edge to catch onto. works flawlessly clipped on a shirt collar, any pocket, a flap with a thick edge, belt loop, anything you can clip it onto pointing down, etc. not so great on pinches of fine fabric. of course there's barely any weight to jostle it off. i expect no problems.
sound quality of course is fine. haven't bought an ipod since '03, so i was pleasantly surprised by the "old" headphones' cord adjuster (you can cinch it up so that the left/right cords are held together up to a point of your choosing--is that new?). i ordered one of those pairs of logitech bluetooth headphones that are super cheap on account of their fragility, and am very excited to try to rig up a cordless gym-going system.
the little dock is quite nice. pleasantly weighty for such a tiny form factor, and has a bottom surface that really seems to grip my desk, which is great--reassures you that it won't blow away or tip over.
i think once again apple's done a great job of providing more control and info than you would expect out of such a simple interface. my favorite example: hitting the "play/pause" button three times takes you to a random song (in shuffle mode), or to the first song in your list (in standard mode--very useful!) this is probably not new, but i didn't know about it before and like it a lot. you can also press and hold the play/pause button to toggle the hold mode (shutting off responsiveness of the buttons). and unplugging headphones automatically pauses playback.
itunes 7.0.2 worked great to load it up (though being used to my 3rd gen ipod i miss the speed of firewire). now when i plug in the shuffle there are two tabs at the top of the content window--one for settings and one for content.
so overall i love it. if forced, i could come up with 1.5 complaints. 1) the engraving is kind of hard to read--small, part of it just slightly fuzzy. .5) though i totally don't expect it to slip from wherever i clip it, i would probably feel more secure if the clip were a bit stronger.
