Form and Function: The New Nano
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October 30, 2008 - 11:00pm
(iPod) nano technology.: The new iPod nano lineup from Apple.
This year, all of the exciting announcements out of Apple’s Cupertino, Calif. lair have seemed to be iPhone and iPod touch-centric. However, in its various iterations, the iPod nano has been an incredibly successful product for Apple in its own right, landing in millions of pockets across the world since its release in 2005. The new nano released last month sports a new, more compact form and a plethora of new color choices that the Apple marketing arm has dubbed “nano-chromatic.” The sleek, curved aluminum enclosure is quite attractive and feels absolutely wonderful in the hand. The new nano is also elongated, allowing for an incredible widescreen display that does very well with video. Below the screen is the usual click wheel; it’s quite small, but the last iPod I used regularly was the full-sized video model from 2005, so those of you who used any of the previous generations of nanos may already be used to this size.
The screen is really quite amazing. Although small, the actual resolution of the display is still very high. This produces a vibrant, sharp image that is pleasant and easy on the eyes. The software is quite responsive and easy to use, a fact that has been central to the iPod’s success over the last seven-plus years. Apple toned back some of the superfluous visual elements, such as floating album covers that found their way into previous models, yielding an excellent experience overall.
The most fun — and useful — hardware change to the new nano was the addition of an internal accelerometer. This allows the iPod to detect its own motion and orientation, just like the iPhone and iPod touch can. Apple has used this new ability in several ways. First, whenever you are browsing through a list of music, you can turn the device on its side to enter “cover flow” mode, browsing through your album covers by rotating the scroll wheel. This is a feature that comes down from the iPhone and iPod touch, as well as from the desktop version of iTunes and Mac OS. In all of its various iterations, I have found it to be much more cool than practical; browsing in a list is simply faster and more efficient than looking at sometimes-obscure, sometimes-absent, album images.
However, the accelerometer is put to some more reasonable applications. While watching video or playing a game, you can orient the device sideways to get a bigger picture. The accelerometer allows you to use the device in either direction, a nice touch that improves the experience a great deal. Additionally, the accelerometer enables the most interesting new feature of the nano: “shake to shuffle.” While listening to a song, simply release the hold switch and give the nano a vigorous shake to change to another song at random. This is great fun, although since the shuffling is not limited to the current album or playlist, you risk ending up on a stinker. However, that’s nothing another good shake can’t fix!
I did find a few issues with the nano, however. First, although the screen is quite vibrant and the resolution is very high, the screen is ultimately very small. After you have watched a movie or played a game on an iPod touch or an iPhone, going back to the nano’s smaller dimensions is difficult. Ultimately, watching video for very long on this iPod is not going to be a very pleasant experience; not that you will be able to spend too much time doing so anyway, as playing video cuts the battery lifetime down to four hours from an astounding 24 hours of audio playback. I also noticed a few stability issues with the software; in a number of instances, the device crashed completely and had to reboot from the Apple-logo screen. However, the device boots relatively quickly, and the crashes always came while using the extras and third-party games and never while actually using the iPod for music or video.
Despite these issues, the new iPod nano is a great addition to the iPod family and is certainly worthy of being sold alongside the iPod touch and the iPhone. The 8 GB model starts at $149 ($144 at the Cornell Store), making it much cheaper than the $199 8 GB iPhone 3G, $229 8 GB iPod touch or even the $249 iPod classic (although this has 120 GB of storage, much higher than the other flash memory-based models). If the Wi-Fi connectivity and larger screen of the iPod touch doesn’t do anything for you, then the iPod nano is a great choice at the gym or on the go, and I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it.