New iPod Nano: Tiny package, big features

Physics, schmysics: That’s what Apple seems to be saying when it comes to the company’s latest iPod Nanos, introduced by Steve Jobs in San Francisco last week. It's impressive what Apple managed to cram into this thing.

The new Nanos are pixies just like their predecessors. The designs are identical: 3.6 inches tall, 1.5 inches wide and less than a quarter-of-an-inch thick. As before, I suspect most buyers will use the Nano mainly for music, though it can also show movies, TV shows, pictures and more.

In this latest go-round, however, Apple added a video camera, FM radio, voice recorder, low-fi mono speaker, larger display (2.2 inches versus 2 inches), and even a pedometer. You can to see just how many calories you’ve burned while traipsing along with the music and, upon synching with a PC or Mac, send the workout data up to the Nike + iPod website.

The new Nanos come in nine handsome colors. They start at $149 for an 8 GB version that can hold about 2000 songs or roughly 8 hours of video. The 16GB model costs $179 and holds about 4000 songs or 16 hours of video. Apple says the music playback time on a fully-charged battery is up to 24 hours; video playback is up to 5 hours.

I’ve been testing a 16GB Nano for several days. My reaction to a couple of the new features:

-- Video. Camcorder functionality is the headline addition here. But the video quality, while certainly decent for the playground-type scenarios you’re likely to try and capture, is not going to win you any awards.

Of course, you can’t beat the convenience. (Even the best camcorders don’t do you much good if you don’t have them at your side.) To add a little pizazz, Apple throws in 16 special shooting effects which you can access by pressing the center of the click wheel. These include “film grain” (like those old movies), black and white, sepia, cyborg and -- my personal favorite -- a kaleidoscope effect.

At the Nano launch, Apple made a point to target competitive-single purpose pocket video cameras, notably the Flip, some versions of which capture HD footage. For its part, the Nano shoots standard definition VGA (640 by 480).

When I first started shooting, my finger would inadvertently cover up the lens, obstructing most scenes. I had to constantly remind myself to take care of where I was positioning my finger. If you’re holding the Nano upright in portrait mode with the click wheel near the bottom facing you, the lens is on the bottom right corner of the other side. If you flip it around so that click wheel is now at the top and facing you, Nano’s built-in accelerometer ensures that your video will still be captured right side up.

In most situations, you’ll likely shoot the Nano by shooting in landscape. This orientation makes it less likely that you’ll inadvertently cover the lens, though on occasion I continued to do so. In this position, you’re meant to hold the Nano in its four corners, which I found just a little bit clumsy.

When you think about the camcorder in terms of being an add-on feature to an iPod, you tend to forgive some of its shortcomings.

-- FM Radio. Nano is by no means the first portable music player to add an FM radio. I thought Apple might include an HD Radio like the one in the new Microsoft Zune player. While the company did not, it does have a “Live Pause” feature that lets you pause and rewind a station for up to 15 minutes.

Nano also has a feature called iTunes Tagging that lets you “tag” some of the songs you’re listening to so that you can preview them and buy them later via iTunes. Tagged songs show up in the iTunes source list. The feature only works with songs that are available in iTunes, and on the still relatively few stations that are participating, notably those from Clear Channel.

For FM reception, you’ll have to plug in headphones. The headphone cord doubles as an FM antenna. Given the low quality of the built-in Nano speaker, that’s how you’d want to listen anyway.

By Ed Baig
Photo: Apple

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