My new 1Gb 2nd Gen Shuffle (which I ordered Sept 13 and which shipped on 10/29 from China) has arrived!!! I stuck 235 songs on it and there's some room left over in case I want to use that for disk storage.
It has WONDERFUL sound quality. It also looks terminally cute sitting in its little dock on top of my microwave out in the kitchen. I plugged it into a USB adapter to top off its charge.
This thing is going to sell and sell and sell in numbers that even Apple probably never imagined. The price is perfect. Apple is so right on the mark when it comes to design and functionality. To have nice slider switches (on/off and shuffle/play-in-order) on something so tiny is wonderful.
Did I leave any compliments out?? If so, it was inadvertent! I named mine TrakSnak. I was going to give it as a gift but as soon as I saw it through the plastic boxing, I knew the gift was becoming a backorder... or several backorders...