Yeah, that's right. It's now physically bigger, now stores 30 times as much stuff, has a longer battery life (20 hours instead of 14 hours), and has a larger, higher resolution screen. Yep, that's right. It's now just a regular, plain iPod ('you know, with video").

It would appear that the craze to find XBox 360 consoles over the weekend left a supply of iPods laying about. So I picked one up. And then purchased it. I got a white one because I've determined that I actually like the white better. Don't get me wrong; the black one is nice looking. But something about the white one is cleaner to me. And I didn't buy it because it was the only choice. Between Fry's, Apple stores, and other places (but not Radio Shack) there were plenty of all iPods in stock (black and white nanos, black and white normals, all sizes). Ok, maybe not plenty, but I saw them in stock.

In any case, I've decided that I like the iPod. It's easy to use, has some nifty features, has decent battery life, and even the largest of the pack (the 60GB iPod, like I have) is still pretty small.

The iPod nano turned me on to the wonders of syncing with iTunes (which, clearly I like now) as well as some of the other nice features. One of those is that when you pull any wire from the headphone jack, it pauses the song. This saves me a step when getting out of the car ; I can just pull the wire between it and the stereo and it pauses. I don't even have to remove the iPod from its sleeve. (It also turns on when the jack is plugged in.)

I also really like the fast forward. I'm not talking about the fast forward by holding down the forward or back buttons. That's actually pretty slow -- no faster than the crazy slow MegaSound VRCD300-USB one. What I'm referring to is when you press the center button twice while music is playing you can then use the wheel to move to a specific location. Spinning it fast can get through an hour in just a few seconds -- much better than 6 seconds a minute where an hour will still take 6 minutes! I just wish this was available during video playback. However, with the ability to keep the play location in what appears to be all playable files, this also becomes less important. Unlike other players, I usually don't have to fast forward to where I was because it keeps it -- and sync it to iTunes!

Anyway, this isn't any sort of review; there are probably a thousand other real reviews out there of this thing.

like my iPod ("you know, with video").

Shane Conder's Whateveritis of Nothing: The iPod nano -- Issues and Impressions

Posted by Shane on November 28, 2005 9:32 AM | Permalink