This is a unit my girlfriend bought after she saw my nice new 4GB black iPod Nano. We went to the local Apple store in New Jersey and could only find the 2GB iPod Nano. Wanting to make sure we could tell our Nanos apart, she purchased a white one even though I told her I'd buy her the 4GB player from the Apple online store. After she curtly told me not to buy one for her and that 2GB would be enough... I decided not to tempt fate or her wrath at that point.
Regardless, here I am thinking for $50 bucks you get 2GB more. But just like Biggie sizing it at Wendy's or getting a large Extra Value meal at McD's, it isn't always worth it to get more if you don't need it. A lesson I keep getting reminded on from the Palm Zire release and the iPod Shuffle.
She been happy with the unit so far since buying her Nano this past weekend. She paid $190 for the unit after the educational discount and uses it for all her jogging and workout activities. If she needs an iPod for long trips, she goes back to her 60GB iPod Photo but keeps her nearby (well, at least she's about to with a cross-country trip looming this weekend).
It again shows that if a product does its job well and easily, everyone will love it. Something that I have to remind myself that everytime I look at a product. Look at Microsoft Office... a great product that does it is basic job well and overall well liked but most people don't know how to access many of the features because they are buried in tons of submenus.
Short Take
There is a part of me that is screaming the $199 2GB is a rip-off from Apple. However, it really depends on your purpose with this device. The unit really holds on average a maximum to 450-460 songs (at approx 4 minutes each at 128 Kbps AAC encoding). That gives you around 30 hours of music on the unit while the 4GB Nano gets you closer to 62 hours of music. The white Nano hides fingerprint marks much better than the black Nano. Otherwise, the functionality of the 2GB and 4GB Nanos were about the same... other than there seemed to be less of that odd slowdown between menu switching and song selections that occassionally occurred with my black 4GB iPod Nano.
The Nano still has very tight integration with iTunes. The Click Wheel is as functional as ever. the Nano is easy to hold and control in one hand. I'm not particularly fond of the iPod white color but I must admit that scratches and fingerprints are noticed much less frequently than with the white Nano than on the black Nano... especially when viewed from a distance. Volume and sound quality seems improved over the 1st and 2nd generation iPod Minis as well. The 1.5 inch color LCD is excellent as well.
Downsides include the clear polycarbonate layer on the front side of the player being much easier to smudge and scratch compared to the iPod mini, odd placement of the port connector and the headphone jack side-by-side, pricing compared to competing hard drive mini-MP3 players. There is currently a lack of stylish protective accessories for the Nano as well. I also continue to see the same odd slowdown issues of the screen that I noted in my Black 4GB iPod Nano... although it occurs less than in my black 4GB Nano.
Some might balk at the $199 price tag for a 2GB unit and the 4GB unit costs $249. For comparison, if you can find the discontinued iPod Mini, that costs $199 for a 4 GB unit and $249 for 6GB and that's before any discounts are taken off. Other competing units run $150-$200 for 5GB units with equivalent features (Creative Zen Micro). If you just want to lay around and listen to music, there are tons of options in the same price range or cheaper that do as good a job as the Nano (look at the tiny MobiBLU Cube sold at Wal-Mart!).
In the end, the iPod nano is an overall great successor to the iPod mini and takes away the worries about damaging the unit due to high impact exercises and the such. The 4GB Nano can be used as a primary unit for those who don't have a ton of music to listen/sort through or a secondary unit for those who do have a ton of music to listen to. The 2GB is more of a secondary MP3 player for those workout sessions where you want a decent but not overwhelming selection of music to choose from. It is also flexible enough to act as a speedy USB hard drive, photo viewer, and some basic PDA functions like an alarm clock and contact keeper.
Price Costs $199 for the 2GB unit. Personally, I think the $50 difference between the 2GB and 4GB in miniscule for double the memory but it depends on your primary uses for the Nano. There is a student/education discount of $20 for iPods through any Apple Store or Apple's online webstore. You can get a bit of a discount online from some retailers as well (usually $5 maybe $10 off). Judging by initial sales, I don't see any major price drops in the near future. Personally, I doubt Apple will bring out a 6GB version of the Nano before 2006.
The 2GB Nano is a great upgrade from the $149 Shuffle although a bit bigger but a ton sexier and much cooler looking/feeling... so it depends on your viewpoint and need for the extra features on the Nano over the Shuffle.
You can read my article
The Art of Buying... Getting your money's worth! to find some tips for saving a little money on electronic purchasing.
By the way, I've put some specific money saving tips for iPod at the very end of this review to complement my epinions article above.
Design The Nano has dimensions of 3.5 x 1.6 x 0.27 inches... yes, it is that thin... thinner than the iPod Shuffle! It weighs only 1.5 ounces. The overall design is very reminiscent of the iPod, iPod photo, iPod U2 models rather than the iPod mini. Size wise, the Nano takes up about 1/3 of the space of the Mini! On a side view, the Nano seems to be made of up three layers... the bright silver back, the middle black or white middle casing, and a clear polycarbonate layer on top of that. On the very top of the unit is the hold switch. The Click Wheel is the only other "movable part" on the Nano. On the bottom of the unit, you find the dock connector port and the headphone port (which provides some problems which I'll go into later). The front of the Nano has a bright 1.5 inch color LCD and the Click wheel used in the last round of Apple iPods. Note that the Click Wheel is pretty flush against the surface of the Nano giving the unit a very slick feel!
The Click Wheel continues to be extremely responsive and perhaps more so than the 1st and 2nd generation iPod minis (I don't have a regular iPod). A quick twitch really shot up the volume very rapidly and I glided through hundreds of songs very rapidly compared to my iPod minis. So it seems the touch sensitivity of the Nano has been tweaked and improved greatly. Faster circling around the Click Wheel sped you through lists of songs while inching around the Click wheel let you go a song at a time.
The design does suffer from some former iPod complaints. The clear polycarbonate layer as well as the back attract fingerprints way too easily. At least it a bit harder to notice with the white Nanos. The clear layer is also very easy to scratch as well and to me is becoming a big complaining point. The white Nano hid them a bit easier. The most severe of the complaints is the placement of the headphone jack near the iPod connector port. While this placement works well with some accessories (the earphone lanyard) it is horrible for others (the actual dock since you have to remove the headphones to put it in the dock!). This placement makes it difficult to remove the dock connector since it is so close to the earphone jack (you often have to remove your earphones to remove the dock connector!). Although not a deal breaker, it is annoying.
Although the 2GB Nano has about 2GB of memory in the unit, only 1.7GB are available for your use! 300 MB are needed for the operating system and other essential software for the iPod nano (this was no different from the 4GB iPod Minis by the way!). No... because it's half the size of the 4GB, it doesn't mean you get 1.85 GB to put music on your 2GB Nano. The software and OS take up the 300 MB of space no matter what iPod you have... except the Shuffle that is.
Note that some of my friends have told me that their 2GB iPod Nano units are displaying 1.8GB of free space. I ran my girlfriend's Nano through a USB hard drive connection showing 1.74GB under Windows XP SP2... maybe there is a few bad kilobytes on her unit compared to my other friends. Oh well, I can barely pry the unit out of her hands these days... so not much I can do if there really is a defect in the device. Either way, it has not malfunction once so far. In Use... The Music, The Photos, and Navigation Overall, the Nano sounds clearer and louder than the iPod minis I own and the Shuffle as well. Both myself and my girlfriend are quite pleased with it and the loudness of the unit even with the included Apple earbuds. Most people will not likely notice any slight sound distortions. There are no audio delays going from one song to another. The unit does not skip under hard jostling (no problems while exercising and jogging). The Nano is capable of playing the following music files:
AAC (16 to 320 Kbps), Protected AAC (from iTunes Music Store), MP3 (16 to 320 Kbps), MP3 VBR, Audible (formats 2, 3 and 4), Apple Lossless, WAV, AIFF
There are 22 preset equalizer settings on the Nano and most basic features for music playback are easily accessible via the Nano's controls. The Shuffle function is quite prominent on the default menu settings. Overall, the Nano is a solid music player.
Navigation remains quick and easy due to easy to use Click Wheel. This remains my favorite way of navigating through hundreds even thousands of songs... especially with the ability to group songs by albums, composer, artist, and the such. There are occassional slight visual glitch where the screen display slows down in changing menus or switching to the song information.
Photos are handled the same way as the old iPod Photo and current generation iPod units. Photos must be synced through iTunes before you can display them on the iPod Nano. iTunes will reformat the image to a small thumbnail so that the iPod Nano can quickly display it on your 1.5 inch screen. Unless you check the box in iTunes, you will not transfer the actual photo files to your Nano to tranfer to other computers. The causes a bit of waste in the memory space department since you are technically storing the image twice on your iPod. The images are vibrant and sharp for the screen... no complaints there. I would even say it is the best color screen on a flash memory MP3 player that I've seen so far. You can easily set a slideshow on the Nano screen with your choice of music. iTunes is capable of transferring the following file types for "viewing" on the Nano:
Syncs iPod-viewable photos in JPEG, BMP, GIF, TIFF, PSD (Mac only) and PNG formats
Please do not ask me about the camera adapter... I don't use it and don't plan to. The Apple representative in the Apple Store states that the camera adapter allows you to download the picutres into you Nano and view them without going through iTunes. I haven't tried that personally however.
Battery Life The battery on its first charge lasted 12 hours over the course of 2 days. Not bad overall. Several runs for now are sowing similar numbers. Note that the batteries are not user replacable and that you will see battery life diminish after 1 to 2 continuous years of use. I'm seeing that with some of my iPod minis now. The battery is 80% charged in 1 1/2 hours via a powered USB 2.0 port. It takes 3 hours to fully charge in this manner.
Note that the Nano can be charged via the Firewire cables but you cannot sync the Nano via Firewire as far as I can tell.
Connecting to a Computer and Use as an External Hard Drive The iPod Nano can sync via USB 1.1 connections although it is extremely slow. ITunes took 15-20 minutes to sync my songs and pictures to the Nano. Note that this was done on my 4GB Nano black.
HD Tach shows a Burst Speed 9.8 MB/s. Random access time of 3.2ms. Average read speed of 5.1 MB/s. This was done on HD Tach 3.0.1.0.
On several attempts, I have not been able to sync the Nano or use the Nano as an external hard drive through a FireWire connection. As of now, Firewire users are currently out of luck.
Extra Software Inside the Nano Like most iPods, the Nano has a World Clock capable of showing three different time zones, an Alarm clock which functions exceptionally well, and 4 games. Just like prior iPods, the Nano stores Contact information if saved to a vCard format, store notes (can display text files if you placed the files in the right directory), Calendar, and a nice looking stopwatch feature. They just have to be copies/moved to the appropriate directories on your iPod.
Non-english speakers rejoice, you have options to set the iPod to any of the following languages:
Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, Swedish, Traditional Chinese and Turkish
On the downside, you have the following:
1. If you wanted .ogg music file playback, the iPod cannot do that.
2. There is no FM tuner on the Nano.
3. There are no recording options like in some other MP3 players.
Keep that in mind when making your decision when comparing to other MP3 players.
iTunes It's an iPod... so the integration with iTunes is very tight. It is easy to purchase music from the iTunes store, encode CDs to appropriate music files types, and sync the songs you want (as well as pictures) to the Nano. You should be using the latest version of iTunes which should be ver. 5.0 as I haven't had problems with it (I have it on my main computer). However note that there have been a number of complaints/bugs reported by iTunes 5.0 users and prior versions of iTunes seem to work well with the Nano as well (version 4.8 and 4.9 seemed fine). The CD that comes with the Nano installs iTunes version 4.9 which is nice and stable (I have this installed in my notebooks). And yes... Podcasts are supported by the Nano!
Note that iPods do not sync with other programs (at least not officially). Unless you are computer/software savvy, iTunes is the only way to sync your iPod to your photo and movie collection. MusicMatch is out the window. RealPlayer unofficially can sync although this changes as Apple releases new firmware for their iPod players. RealPlayer compatibility with iPod is shaky at best.
In the Box You get a USB dock connector cable, the iPod white earbuds, 2 sets of foam coverings for the earbuds, iTunes version 4.9 software and PDF instruction manuals on a single CD, an adapter to attach to the iPod mini dock to more easily fit the iPod Nano. You have to buy the actual USB AC adapter if you want to charge the iPod Nano away from a computer or a USB 2.0 hub.
Accessories? At the time I write this, there are still very few Nano specific accessories available. You can get the colorful bandaid... urmmm I mean armbands... for workouts at your local Apple store. The iPod Nano tubes might be available within a few weeks which will help protect the Nano although hides the Nano's beautiful shape and well as increases the Nano's size slightly. The tubes also don't protect the screen area as well. The lanyard is available on the Apple store website although I worry about how tightly the Nano is connects to the lanyard (note that I haven't seen the lanyard personally). Most power adapters that worked with the iPod mini should work with the Nano.
As of January 2006, there are a ton of cases and other fashionable extras for the Nano. As far as extending the capabilities of the Nano... nothing specific as of yet. It would be a safe assumption that any such accessories would connect via the dock connecter port.
You can read my review on the
Logitech mm50 portable speakers for the iPod. I love these things. They are a fair size with very few compromises on quality and sound!
I've seen some people cut holes in a baby sock and use that as a case for their iPod Nano. I'm not kidding about this.
Competition? There's a ton. Dedicing on an MP3 player Apple's own iPod mini, iRivers H10 and 900 series flash players, Samsung's army of flash memory units and more depending on what features you wanted to see on your MP3 player. On the whole, the iPod Nano is more expensive than all 4-6GB mini hard drive based MP3 players although cheaper than competing flash drive players (due to the competition having smaller memory sizes usually 1GB or less). You should look at MobiBLU Cube for the smallest known MP3 with or without a LCD screen (this unit has a LCD screen too!). Even the Shuffle is competition at $50-$100 less than a 2GB iPod Nano.
A combination of memory size, style/design, a fairly robust feature set, and ease of use give the overall edge to Apple... but it by no means says that the competition is bad. If your music collection is on another PC jukebox software like MusicMatch or RealPlayer, you probably should look into other MP3 players first.
When you start looking at an MP3 player... Ask yourself these questions:
1. Where am I going to use this? The gym or jogging? Look at flash memory based players. Car/train/bus/plane/etc trips mostly... think hard drive based players and even CD-R based MP3 players.
2. Is size a factor?
3. What features do I need on it? Just for music? Do I need FM on my player? Do I need to see pictures on such a small screen? Do I need video capabilities?
4. Is it easy for me to use?
5. Do I like the jukebox software it is compatible with on my PC?
6. Do I need to record voices, conversations, music, or video with my player?
7. How much do I want to spend on this?
8. Will I use the MP3 player often? If the answer is no, why are u buying this?
9. Do I need to use this as an external hard/flash drive?
10. How fragile is the MP3 players I considering?
The Aftermath My girlfriend loves her unit and doesn't mind the 1.7GB limitation. When she wants to, she has iTunes perform a random auto-fill to keep variety in her carried song selection. She carries it on the lanyard or in a pink fluffy baby sock (with holes cut out of it of course). She didn't like how the invisible shield protector looks and felt on my Nano and Video iPod units so she refuses to use that. She couldn't care less about photos on the unit... only keeping a handful of poignant photos on her Nano. She doesn't give a hoot about the loss of 2GB of space... which means she saved $50 for a Nano that does what she needs it to do and then some. No fuss... no muss... she's happy. I guess you don't always have to supersize everything.
By the way, personally, I still would pay up the extra $50 for the 4GB iPod Nano! Money Saving tips
Although these can be applied to various items especially other electronics, I am doing this specifically for Apple iPod products since they rarely drop in price from Apple's MSRP until Apple discontinues production on it (at least that is the most common scenario). I composed a few ways to save a few bucks on the iPod here... especially if you want to try before you keep your purchase. Note that purchases from the Apple store or Apple.com website means you subject yourself to the extremely inflexible returns policy (10% restocking fee for returns whether it is defective or NOT!).
If you have never shopped at Crutchfield.com, this is a good place to buy your Nano from. Crutchfield has excellent customer service, provides additional printed material on connecting to other devices, and offers a vast array of online help. On top of that, you get free shipping on purchases over $249 and no sales tax unless you live in Virginia. Since the Nano doesn't have a significant price drop from any reputable store, crutchfield is an excellent place to buy one... especially with their flexible return policy. On top of that, using a referral code will also net you a $20 discount (first time shoppers only!) and give the referrer a $20 credit at Crutchfield as well. My referral code is p21r2-pqrdb-d9ryg and inputed on the payment screen (where you put in your credit card number). I get in stock purchases from Crutchfield within 2-3 business days! Use the link from epinions to reach Crutchfield.com.
Another quick discount is using the A9.com search engine. Why? This is amazon.com search engine that also incorporates results from google.com. When you use the A9 for a certain period of time, you earn a 1.57% discount from purchases made at amazon.com (note that amazon must be the seller of the product! Someone selling a product through Amazon.com site does NOT earn the discount!). Couple this with amazon's overall good customer service, no sales tax, potential free shipping, and flexible return policy, it makes purchasing the Nano from amazon very tempting.
PCMall.com, MacMall.com, PCConnection.com, MacConnection.com, and affliated sites are decent places to shop as well. Often the price will be lower by $5-10 with free accessories (after rebate of course) and sometimes a decent mail-in rebate is available on top of that (rare for the Nano in my searches so far). There is no sales taxes expect for people in California but S&H do apply. The PCMall and MacMall sites allow for the same laser engraving that is available at the Apple.com store. I don't have experience with their customer service department but I believe it is more flexible that Apple.
Target.com is a decent place to buy the Video iPod (when it becomes available for sale there). You will often find a 10% coupon to use and the return policy is much better than Apple's policy. However, target.com charges sales tax and S&H charges. If you want to purchase from Target.com, I would recommend using a Citibank credit card that is enrolled in the Thank You Merchants Program since that will give you up to 7 points per dollar spent at target.com (5000 points gets a $50 gift certificate to places like Target. 3000 points gets a $25 certificate).
Buy.com is another good place to make a cheap purchase. Buy.com will have a small discount with available dollars off or small percentage coupons available to further lower the price. Couple this with the often free shipping and no sales tax to most of the US (I believe they are based in California) and sites like ebates.com or fatwallet.com can lower the price of the Nano up to 10%! However, the customer service at buy.com leaves something to be desired.
