Sounded too good to be true, and it was

 

I bought a 2GB shuffle MP3 player on Ebay last week and it arrived today.

What I got for my amazingly low price of $18, with free shipping, was a crappy Chinese counterfeit of the Apple iPod Shuffle. It was advertised with the above photo, which looks like the Apple version.

What showed up was as pictured except that the volume and track controls on the circular white piece are rotated 90 degrees clockwise.

I will concede that the seller made no reference to Apple or iPod in the listing, but they hooked me with the word "shuffle," which I supposed was an Apple trademark.

I've got it on its three-hour charging cycle now just to see if it works.

But the worst thing about it is that it doesn't synch with iTunes. The instructions say:

1. Synch using Windows Media Player
2. Copy files with Windows Explorer

To paraphrase John Belushi in "Animal House," I fucked up. I trusted them.

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Later: The good news is that the thing works but is far less user-friendly than an Apple product.

I can load MP3s using Windows Explorer, a slow and tedious process. But this "shuffle" doesn't shuffle - it plays songs in a fixed sequence rather than randomly shuffling them. It is, then, a very basic crappy $18 MP3 player. Caveat emptor.