Stylish MP3 player with mixed reaction
Strengths:4GB flash storage. Small and compact. Color LCD screen capable of displaying pictures. Looks, looks, looks. Artificial scarcity. Click wheel.
Weaknesses:Possible screen defects. Easy to scratch. Headphone connector at bottom. iTunes restrictions. Pricey. Click wheel.
Posted Dec 30, 2005 - I was one of the first to buy one of these. In that time of about 2 to 3 months, MP3 players in general - and even the iPod line - had advanced again.
First, this MP3 player has 4GB flash memory. At the time, that was the most by far among flash players.
Flash memory, by the way, is solid state with no moving parts. This contrasts with hard drive-based players which do have moving parts (the spinning hard drive). No moving parts means no "CD player effect" of skipping during activities like running or jogging. It also means it won't develop hard drive problems, like bad or corrupt sectors. However, flash memory does have a lifespan of how many times it can be rewritten, though I believe that lifespan should be long enough to outlast this item's usefulness.
Back to the review, while 4GB of flash memory made the iPod Nano unique in those early days, there are now competitors in that space (and at lower prices), so this older benefit has to be taken with a grain of salt now.
The iPod Nano is quite small, flat and light. This is great for guys, since we don't usually carry purses or pocketbooks for carrying things and the iPod Nano will slip into a shirt or jacket pocket without looking or feeling too conspicuous. Also, it might be difficult to have shrunk the iPod Nano any more and still have a decent screen size and have the click wheel be useful.
Speaking of the screen, the iPod Nano has a color LCD display for displaying the menus, song names, and pictures. This (and the storage sizes) are the main components that separate iPod's Nano line from iPod's Shuffle line (plus the Nano, because it has a display screen, has more available play features, etc.) The screen is not that big, but it's still useable. Actually, it's quite like a cellphone display. I'm not a big fan of storing and displaying pictures, so I haven't played around with this a lot and it's not a very big deal to me. It's there, if you like it.
The iPod's main benefit is its looks and styling. It looks like an iPod. Everyone who looks at it will know it's an iPod. Basically, it looks pretty good from a minimalist point of view.
It has also been selling out everywhere since it's debut and throughout the holiday season. However, throughout all that time, it was still readily available through Apple's own website. People who have been trying to buy it everywhere else will think you have something rare. People who know you could have just gotten it from Apple's website at any time know otherwise. That seemed like an odd practice to me, but I'm sure limiting quantities to all other suppliers and thus driving customers to order directly from their website can only help Apple's bottomline by cutting out middlemen.
Now, you'll notice I listed the click wheel as both a strength and a weakness. A lot of people out there consider the click wheel to be a miracle in intuitive design. Therefore, the click wheel is a strength. However, I am not one of those people. Therefore, it is also a weakness. Sorry, but moving your thumb in a clockwise direction to move down on menus and moving your thumb in a counter-clockwise direction to move up on menus seemed a little odd to me and took some getting used to. Perhaps it's because I had grown accustomed to the little lever on the Creative Muvo (you pushed up on the lever to go forwards and back on the lever to go backwards). We're all coming from different places and perspectives. Different strokes for different folks, right?
As for the negatives, it bears mentioning again that I was one of the first to order an iPod Nano. This, as often it does with rollouts of the latest and greatest technology gadgets (as early adopters of PSP's and Gameboy's with dead pixels know), turned out to be a bad thing. It turns out that a small but significant number of earlier iPod Nano's had a manufacturing defect that could result in cracked displays from simple bending stresses. Since I've babied my iPod Nano, I still can't really tell if I'm an unfortunate owner of one of these from the bad batches, but Apple claims that it will repair or replace iPod Nano's that have that problem. In my opinion, this shouldn't have happened at all and, for the premium paid on Apple products, the problems should have been picked up by the quality assurance department before any of these ended up in consumers' hands.
All iPod Nano owners will run into the fact that all iPod Nano's scratch easily. If you do not want your iPod Nano to get all scratched up really fast, you have to buy a case or some sort of protection for it. Make sure you get one that will also protect the display, because that can get scratched, and, if it does, your iPod Nano is almost useless.
I'm running out of review space, so final comments. iTunes imposes restrictions. If you don't like those restrictions, look into an open source software called "ephpod". For 4GB flash players w/o the color LCD, Sandisk has one for about $100 less when on sale.
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Finally, they get it right
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