September 9th, 2005

I’m sure some­one on the inter­nets haven’t heard of the new iPod nano. The thing is an absolute beauty. A quar­ter of an inch thick, 1.5 ounces and 4gb of sound stor­age … wow. It also has all of the fea­tures of the stan­dard iPods, such as color screens, album art, etc etc. I haven’t been this inter­ested in an iPod since the first ones were released in 2001.

Well, I jumped on the band­wagon as soon as I saw the new iPods had been released. I have a 40gb ‘regular’ iPod, but I’ve been wait­ing a while to get some­thing smaller and even easier to carry. While even after sell­ing my old iPod, I’ll just pretty much break even, I think the trade­off for size, the color screen, and bat­tery life (14 hours) is well worth giving up the mas­sive stor­age of my 40gb. Basi­cally, over time I’ve come to real­ize that while it’s cool to be able to have all my music every­where I go, I rarely listen to more than one or two playlists, cou­pled with a few new albums. Having some­thing that can truly fit in any pocket (while the old iPod mar­ket­ing claimed you could, I dare you to do it all the time) is going to be really nice.

Pic­tures are at the end of this arti­cle. You have to see this thing to believe how small it is. I’ve only had it for a day, but it’s funny … the 40gb iPod seems like a brick now. I was clean­ing it up before list­ing it on eBay and the thing seems mas­sive com­pared to the tiny nano, not to men­tion the fact that the mono­chrome screen looks like a joke com­pared to the tiny but bril­liant screen. I rec­om­mend this little fella 100%. Best way to put it:

Just because I can carry all my tunes on one iPod, it doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily mean that I want to. The form factor and long bat­tery life alone make this worth buying.

Also, might I add that the new iTunes 5 is simply stun­ning. The inter­face has been tweaked to look a lot more like that of Mail 2, and is a lot cleaner, as well as adding a few new fea­tures that make my time lis­ten­ing to music a lot more enjoy­able. The nested fold­ers for playlists, along with better search capa­bil­ity alone make it a great upgrade. I’m still wait­ing for seam­less play­back (like you hear on CDs) and the abil­ity for iTunes to search and find album covers to add to your mp3s just like other apps do. All in all, a great upgrade.

How­ever, I’m start­ing to wonder what exactly is going through the heads of the UI design­ers over there in Cuper­tino. iTunes 5 isn’t Aqua (the stan­dard look of most Apps), it’s not Uni­fied (the ‘new’ look of some apps, but not all apps. And there’s not really any guide­lines for when to use it). It’s not Brushed metal really, but kind of. It’s some sort of mix between Metal and Uni­fied, and hon­estly I’m won­der­ing what’s next. At some point in the past 3 or so years the UI guys just decided to throw out the inter­face guide­lines, and it’s start­ing to show. One of the great things about Mac OS - inter­face con­sis­tency - is start­ing to show a lot of cracks.

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3 Responses to “iPod Nano”

1. Erik says:
   September 11th, 2005 at 10:01 am

   Oddly, the pic­ture where you’re hold­ing it looks like Apple’s awful new com­mer­cial with the hands fight­ing over the pre­cious nano.
2. Daniel Andrews says:
   September 11th, 2005 at 11:19 am

   Get your hands off!

   Yea, I hate that com­mer­cial. Hon­estly, the only Apple com­mer­cial I’ve ever liked was that Powe­book com­mer­cial with the Mini me guy and Yao Ming.
3. Naomi says:
   September 16th, 2005 at 6:20 pm

   WOW! I WANT ONE!!! hehe ;)