After roughly 3-5 seconds deliberating I gave in today and bought the new blue Ipod Nano from Argos (it’s the one at the back for those of you not up on your Ipod knowledge). It packs a generous 8gb flash memory, together with Apple’s new UI, and video playback giving it a much bigger wow factor compared to his older brother the second generation Nano.
After a day’s fiddling with the new device I’ve been very impressed, Coverflow works extremely well, but I’m unconvinced that this feature would be used if you stored a large amount of albums on the device, at the moment it feels more like a novelty than the ‘new way’ of selecting tracks on your Ipod. Video works well, but like my other video Ipod I’ve never sat and watched a full TV programme or movie on the device so I’m not going to start now. Although I have transferred Radio Nowhere by Springsteen to show the people I meet an example of video running on the new Nano, which is very sleek. To be honest there is a limit in size of screen in which I’m wiling to watch video, with a time limit of 5 minutes being just about right to watch a music video or something along those lines, anything longer and my eyes begin to hurt. Having the video feature is a nice touch, and a selling point for Apple but for me it’s neither an advantage or disadvantage.
Currently the only issue I have with the device is it’s shape, which is totally unfitting for anybodies pants pocket. This could be me, but I just don’t like the shape of a perfect square in my pocket, a more rounded rectangle feels better and goes with the length of your leg, very much the same way you store you mobile phone in your pocket. I believe the design would have been better suited leaving the Nano the same shape as its previous brother and increasing the screen downwards, causing the user to rotate the Nano to a landscape position when want to view video.
Oh I nearly forgot here is the family;
I’m truly impressed with the Nano and it’s features, 8 out of 10.
-Kyle