A short update on the use of the 3G iPod shuffle. Very short.

It’s sitting in a drawer in my desk, unused.

While the buttons on the headphones weren’t particularly difficult to use, the shuffle turned out to be useless in the gym for another reason. After two weeks or so of use, it started randomly skipping through songs, pausing, and fast-forwarding on its own. Turns out the buttons on the headphones short easily when sweaty and aren’t sealed well enough to avoid it in the gym. (I know – Leo and the MacBreak Weekly crew just did a show mentioning sweat and the iPhone. Life is full of weird duplication.)

This seems like a very poor oversight on the part of Apple. Isn’t the Shuffle supposed to be designed for high activity? Sealing the button would make sense.

I don’t have any plans to purchase a replacement set of headphones from Apple unless that design flaw is resolved. It’s a shame, too. I did enjoy using the Shuffle in the gym, but it’s now an $80 nothing gathering dust in a drawer.

I purchased a new black iPod shuffle on the Friday after the announcement. The package arrived the following Tuesday after a short 21-hour trip from China. I put it to work the following day in the gym and have been using it regularly since. I have some firsthand thoughts, both good and bad.

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My own wish list for the iPhone 3.0 announcement today.

1. Cut and paste: check
2. Better power management
3. Background apps: sorta – push notification
4. Bluetooth stereo: check
5. App management tools

Not a long list, but one that would seem to be entirely realistic.

Additional good stuff: landscape in all apps, MMS, voice memos, search all Apple apps (including IMAP email searches on the server) in a dedicated screen, media scrobbling, notes sync.

Very nice set of updates. And, I’m glad they’re all within the current hardware set. I’d hate trying to justify a new phone.

Minutes ago, the Apple Store rolled out a full slate of Mac desktop updates. These include additions to the iMac, Mac Mini, Mac Pro, Time Capsule, and AirPort Extreme.

As I’ve noted, I plan to make one of the new iMacs my own. It’ll likely be the 2.93 GHz 24″.

It’s definitely a good day when a birthday coincides with the first game of spring training. Tomorrow. 12:05 pm CT. Marlins at Cardinals.

Google has added another smart feature to their lineup: tasks. That’s not actually news (it’s been available fir at least a couple of weeks), but I just added a tasks icon to the home screen on the iPhone. It’s now possible to keep my todo list synched with Google from the iPhone. That means Google has covered three of the four necessities with iPhone sync: contacts, calendars and tasks.

That leaves just one piece missing: push GMail. Rumor had it that this will be available soon, via the same ActiveSync tools already in use for contact and calendar sync. Push mail is another piece I’ve missed from the Blackberry. I did set up my GMail account to forward to Yahoo, which does have true push mail. It was tough to keep folders in sync, though, and to remember to change the return address in replies to the GMail account.

So, though I didn’t really realize that I missed it, push mail from Google will be a welcome addition to the iPhone.

We’re within sight of upgrading the main machine at home from a Mac Mini, purchased in December 2006, to a new 24″ iMac. Unlike some of the other Apple products we’ve purchased – products that were upgraded within weeks after the purchase – it seems that our timing may be right on this one.

In the past few weeks, I’ve seen several articles indicating a new iMac line in March. The features vary, but most of the speculation includes quad-core processors and higher-quality Nvidia graphics. From my limited Apple experience, that seems consistent with previous Apple hardware upgrades.

In any event, this purchase may happen sometime in late March or early April – after any new iMacs have started shipping. Our Mac Mini purchase came toward the end of the Core Duo line, processors that were replaced with the Core 2 Duo. My first Shuffle was, within weeks, replaced by a new design. The purchase of my 30 GB iPod (my fourth iPod, at that time) was quickly overshadowed by upgrades to the iPod line and, a bit later, by the initial iPhone release. For a bleeding-edge guy like myself, that was pretty frustrating. I did wait for the 3G iPhone and will likely get a good year of use before the inevitable Apple upgrade.

So, maybe just a few years into our Apple use, we’re finally syncing with the Apple release schedule. If so, it’ll be nice to have a machine that I know is the current state of the art for that model for longer than just a few months.

Update I’ve activated the WP-Polls plugin. Vote now in the sidebar for the features you most expect to see in the new iMacs.

I’m really still adjusting to the finger typing of the iPhone. I was a master thumb-typer on the Blackberry, but it’s tough to do on the iPhone.

One app that’s made it a bit easier is TouchType. It allows a user to compose email and Tweets, with spell-check, in a separate window, using the landscape mode keyboard. It works nicely and does make it a bit easier to thumb-type. Even at that, the missing tactile response of the Blackberry buttons is a big minus. I’m adjusting, but it’s the one thing about the Blackberry that I really prefer over the iPhone.