I used a second-hand, first-generation iPod for some time, then upgraded to the sleek, think video iPod a little over a year ago.

Although the new one is better in many ways, most notably being far thinner and lighter, I’ve always preferred the old “click” wheel over the newer smooth scrolling wheel.

• Although the new “smooth” wheel makes the click-wheel seem klunky, the physical feedback that the clicks gave me made it far easier to scroll to the correct selection. With the new wheel, I commonly go too far with my scrolling and end up with the wrong selection.
• In the winter, when I was wearing gloves, I was unable to use the smooth wheel; I never had this problem with the original. This might seem to be a minor issue, but for me it was major as I typically use my iPod in the car, and during the winter I commonly wore gloves in the car.

Everyone seems to love the iPod design — am I the only one who has gripes? Post thoughts below.

If you’re like me, you may spend a lot of iPodding time using the Shuffle Songs feature. It’s a great tool for the lazy man (ahem), and especially nice for car use (where I typically use my iPod) since driving while navigating the screens probably isn’t the best idea. I do, however, have a few suggestions for how to improve this feature.

1) Shuffle Profiles
The biggest frustration that I have is the limited controls over what is included in shuffle. One could probably argue that the whole point of “shuffle” is that the user gives up control of what songs play, but I still believe that creating shuffle “profiles” with different rules would be a great improvement to this feature. This would obviously have to be handled through the iTunes interface (one of the general challenges with the iPod, that so much of the customization is done through a different program). The user could choose from a list of things to include or exclude from the profile, i.e. by artist, genre, keyword, etc.
(I realize that iPod does have such a thing as “Smart Playlists”, but this seems more appropriate for smaller playlist features, thought admittedly I haven’t used it all that much.)

2) Batch Exclude from Shuffle
A user can pretty easily exclude a single song from shuffle, but this needs to be done individually, which makes excluding an entire album or artist to be quite time consuming. If batch updating of (certain) tags is allowed, why not allow batch shuffle exclusion?

3) Jump out of Shuffle into Album/Artist
I typically use the shuffle feature when I don’t have something particular in mind to play; yet it is also quite common that shuffle picks a song by an artist that inspires me to hear more from that artist or album. To do this, however, I have to navigate through the menus to find those songs, which is somewhat annoying, especially while driving. If there was an easy way to jump directly to the artist or album, this would be very helpful.

That’s all for now; I’ll add more ideas if I can think of any.