SiliconBeat

Speaking of Altec-Lansing, I’ll likely be playing around this weekend with a new speaker system from the company, the iPhone-compatible inMotion Max.

In coming weeks, I also plan on testing out a handful of new headphones, including a pair of new models — the 200 and the 300 — from SoundID.

Finally — and I realize I’m a little late to this — but I’ve been playing around this week with Apple’s new iPod shuffle. My first take: I love the ultra-slim size, and I generally like the new VoiceOver feature, which uses a computer-generated voice to tell you what song is playing or what playlists are available.

But I hate that Apple’s decision to incorporate the volume, VoiceOver and play/stop/fast-forward/reverse controls into a button on the headphone wire means that I can’t use my noise-isolating headphones with the shuffle.

And I ran into a weird glitch today where the shuffle was very slow to respond to requests to turn the volume up or down. So slow, that I kept pressing the volume control button over and over, trying to get turn the volume down, not knowing whether it was responding at all to what I was doing.

What ended up happening was that this action turned the volume down completely, so that I couldn’t tell even if the device was still on. So I did the reverse, trying to turn up the volume. Again, there was a lag, so I pressed the volume control repeatedly. By the time the device finally responded, the volume went all the way up, blasting my ears.

I’m playing with the device right now and not having the same issue; it responds immediately to presses of the volume buttons. So who knows, maybe it was a one-time glitch. I’ll keep my eye — or, rather ear — on it.