New iPod Nano Fulfills Its Mission, Mostly

New iPod Nano Fulfills Its Mission, Mostly
By Stephen Williams

It’s glossy, it’s slick, the video’s for real, the audio speaker’s not.

I took a run up to the Apple store on 14th Street in Manhattan on Thursday, and a young lady showed me the new iPod Nano, a gold colored version with a sassy gloss finish and a nifty camera lens peeking out the rear. It was the only demo Nano in the house, she said, but I could buy all the Nanos I wanted — in any color — for about $150 and up.

After a short hands-on fool-around with it — others were waiting, real customers — I concluded that:

* The video camera’s a delightful feature.
* The speaker inside the Nano — if you can call it a speaker — lacks any fidelity.
* The FM tuner’s a neat addition (although not too effective inside the store).
* The satiny finish is cool.

The larger issue, however, is: why is there no camera in the new iPod Touch model?

It’s curious, since little brother Nano has one, and its seems a no-brainer to install a camera into the Touch, since it could be transplanted directly from the iPhone 3GS, which shares a similar form factor. There were stories last week that some “technical problems” had arisen in the camera option, but it appears that Apple might just be waiting to upgrade the device. Again.

Back to the FM radio, a component that Apple has steadfastly refused to include in its portable music players. As an article in Wired points out, “the answer comes with iTunes-Tagging. In addition to live pausing of the radio stream (and rewinding up to 15 minutes through the buffer) you can tag tracks by hitting the center button. If a radio station supports it, the song info is saved and later you can see a list in iTunes alongside, you guessed it, the option to buy the song.”

Meanwhile, as I reported earlier, it had appeared that Apple has lowered the prices on some “older” iPod models, including dropping the price on the iPod Touch with 32 gigabytes from $399 to $279. However, the latest update to Apple’s online Store page only refers to the new models introduced on Wednesday. A manager at the Apple store in Manhattan told me that all previous iPod incarnations had been boxed and shipped out of the Chelsea location.
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Smaller? Thinner? Camera enabled? Rewind capable? This is a cool ipod!
Find out more here.

The Apple iPod Mini

Owners of the original Apple iPod clamors for more from the makers of the iPod music experience.
The latest ipod player available in the market comes in a smaller and leaner frame, and is marketed in a rainbow of colors. This is the Apple iPod mini.

The Apple iPod mini has a platform of MAC or Windows OS. Some original Apple iPod users have already seen the Apple iPod mini with a new four gigabytes harddrive space for a US$ 249 price tag. It is not a secret that an additional of US$ 50 will get you a fifteen gigabytes iPod that would store somewhere around 2,700 more music files. That is a lot more than the Apple ipod mini.

This is because harddrive space is so much important for Apple iPod users, the original Apple iPod have so much space available to the user of about forty gigabytes. This amount of space can store more than five thousand songs. Aside from this, the original Apple iPod also has a longer battery life.

However, criticizers should consider the frame of the Apple iPod mini. It is slender and is more styled, that which made it seem more functional and more attractive to the eyes and has a more ergonomic feel to the fingers. To most people, it would not be the ideal music player, but to the 99,000 or so Apple iPod mini users, they beg to disagree.

The Too Sexy Apple iPod Mini

The Apple iPod mini is compared to a US$ 1,200 purse from Chanel. This is because the US$ 249 Apple iPod mini, with its variety of five colors, brings out class and posh.

It has an anodized body made of aluminum and weighs about 3.6 ounces. It measures about 2 inches in width, 3.6 inches in height, and only about half an inch in thickness. It does not look like it at first glance, but the Apple ipod mini is almost like a featherweight than the original Apple iPod.

It is also silky to the touch and smooth. It also fits wonderfully in your palm. This is the reason for the premium price tag.

The Apple iPod mini also has no external moving parts. You will notice that underneath the smaller 1.67-inch LCD screen lie the light touch-sensitive and highly ergonomic Click Wheel. This Click Wheel is the one which incorporates the Apple iPod mini's other controls. The control's buttons are located on the pad itself. This is much different than the original Apple iPod's four function buttons that is located above the scroll pad.

Anyone who is familiar with the software for the iPod knows about the seamless integration of iPod with iTunes. In no time, you would be cruising with the tunes.

The Apple iPod mini behaves just like exactly as other newer generation Apple iPods. It now even packs a battery life of 8 hours. The original Apple iPods have a longer battery life.

Besides the smaller physical dimensions and the new warm minimalist choices of color, which can be gold, silver, pink, green and blue. A major difference observed between the original Apple iPod and the Apple iPod mini is the harddrive space capacity.

The Apple iPod mini has a tiny Hitachi harddrive that can hold about four gigabytes of music. Music files include AAC, Audible, MP3, WAV and AIFF. This is enough storage for a number of Apple iPod mini users.

Apple iPod users usually prefer to carry an entire library of music any time of the day. Rather than manually selecting and transferring specific songs to the Apple iPod mini. The Apple iPod mini can only hold as much as a fraction of the forty gigabytes music collection.

The Apple iPod mini also has accessories that include the earbuds, a USB 2.0 cable and a FireWire dock connector, an AC adaptor, a belt clip, and the Apple iPod mini software.

The Apple iPod mini could have been more lenient by adding a dock or armband to teh package.

The US$ 29 armband is a great help for joggers who want to listen to good music while jogging and carrying the very lightweight and effectively skip-free Apple iPod mini.

Conclusion

To summarize, the Apple iPod mini has a sleek styling, it is a small size and has an excellent integrated Click wheel. It has a possible disadvantage to the user, though, that is the price per megabyte which is much higher as compared to the original Apple iPod.