While a large percentage of the world has been staging a love-in with the iPad, I’ve been falling in love with another of Apple’s devices. A couple of weeks ago I received an iPod nano as a gift, and as I already had an iPod touch I wondered what use it would be to me. I had, previously, pondered Apple’s strategy for this device (albeit the 4th generation device, not the 5th) but now I find myself eating my words… absolutely feasting on them in fact.
For something so packed with features it’s incredibly thin and light – I worried about snapping it when removing it from the box. The first issue I hit was the only negative – it’s the 8 gb model, so realistically has about 7.3 gb of storage. My music collection weighs in at 11.2 gb, so I had to de-select a number of bands and artists. Goodbye Coldplay (mind you, I should remove them anyway).
Now the positive points. As I said, it’s thin and light – incredibly so. It barely registers any weight in your hand. A gnat’s lunch weighs more. So in the last week I’ve tucked it into a suit and shirt pocket, and used it when I wouldn’t normally consider using one of the bigger devices.
Now, I keep going on about how thin and light it is, because it’s not just a music player. It’s amazing enough that they can fit 8 gb of storage, a battery, and the gubbins for a 2.2 inch (240 x 376 pixels) screen into it. But that’s not all – it has an external speaker, a radio and a video camera (complete with microphone). Okay, it’s not high definition video, but considering what it’s squeezed into I consider that an amazing feat of micro-engineering. And the quality is pretty good.
This now means I’m a three-iPod guy. My original 20 gb white 4th generation classic (complete with a monochrome LCD screen) provides music in the car, the iPod touch caters for games, e-mail, videos, Twitter and many other applications… but the nano looks set to be my primary device for music outside of the car.
