Apple claims the throne for the world's smallest music player. And MB Technews claims its first two units. The silver-colored couple got the attention they truly deserve from Manila Bulletin employees who managed to take first looks.

The third generation iPod Shuffle has been smaller than ever, measuring at 1.8 inches long, 0.7 inches wide, 0.3 inches thick, and weighs only 10.7 grams. It's like carrying a bubblegum stick that clips tightly on your clothing.

At nearly half of the size of the previous model, it is also the first music player that talks to you, literally. It has the revolutionary new VoiceOver feature that enables the Shuffle to speak out your song titles, artists and playlist names.

Even though iPod Shuffle is significantly smaller than a AA battery, it now has 4 Gigabytes of storage space that holds up to 1,000 songs (based on a 4-minute track with a 128-Kbps AAC encoding).

Like the previous model,the third generation iPod Shuffle is ultra-weareble. It features a gorgeous new aluminum design with a built-in stainless steel clip carrying the Apple logo.

With the small design, all the controls are now conveniently located within the earphone cord. You don't have to touch the device unless you are to turn it on or off, or activate the shuffle feature.

The cord of the Shuffle's earphones are slightly thicker that those made for other iPods maybe because of the control keys placed at the right earphone cord. The small strip has a groove in the middle which is the play, pause and skip buttons rolled into one.

A single press on the groove plays or pause the track. If you want to skip to the next track, you have to press it twice, and thrice to skip to the previous track. If you want to know the title of the track and the artist, press and hold the center groove until you hear the VoiceOver feature.

The VoiceOver feature easily lets you switch between multiple playlists on your iPod Shuffle. The tiny device can speak 14 languages including English, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish.

Aside from the Shuffle telling you the name of the song and artist, it even tells you its status information, such as battery life.

The iPod Shuffle is based on Apple’s incredibly popular shuffle feature, which randomly selects songs from your music library. But with the previous Shuffle models, there's no way of telling which track is currently playing and what song is up next.

The new iPod Shuffle comes in silver or black and you can clip to almost anything and take it with you everywhere you go. iPod Shuffle features up to 10 hours of battery life.

MB Technews is now taking the new iPod Shuffle for a spin -- our review to follow in the next ish.