Sprayfly

Ok, I got my iPod nano (2Gb) for christmas. Here’s a little review:

First Impressions

The packaging is very neat and appeals to the eye. More importantly, the nano is well wrapped up and protected. There is no chance of any damage by dodgy courriers should you order one of these over the internet.

The Nano

Handily, the nano already had some charge in it straight out of the box and so I was able to have a play straight away.
The clickwheel is incredibly sensitive and has a soothing feel. The nano creates a sort of clicking noise as you turn it around (this noise can be turned off or fed through the headphones).
Here is a list of the box contents:

• Nano
• Headphones
• Two sets of earbuds for headphones (a spare pair!)
• USB Docking Cable
• Quick start instructions and CD
• Docking adapter
• Some nice apple stickers

Whilst a version of iTunes is included on the CD, I downloaded the latest version via the internet here. I recommend that everyone does this.

Initial Charge!

The first thing I did was to put the nano on charge. Bear in mind that the nano needs to be charged for 3 hours the first time you charge it. This is to set the charging cycle to maximise battery life.

So I sat and twiddled my thumbs and felt a bit helpless really- all the nano screen displays is the message ‘do not disconnect’. However, I have since realised that you [bold]can[/bold] use your nano whilst charging on a PC. You have to press the eject button on your iPod in iTunes. Power is still supplied to the nano via the USB cable but you cannot transfer music or photos (or indeed any files) without unplugging the nano and plugging it back in.

It is worth noting with all iPods that you have to use a firewire or USB charger. There is no wall adapter supplied so this will probably mean that you will have to use a computer to charge your nano. However, if you have other devices with a USB port, notably, routers (such as an Asus WL-HDD in my case) you should be able to use these. You can also buy (at great cost) an AC to USB adapter from Apple or an in-car charger.

Music

In the end, I decided to set up the nano whilst waiting for it to charge. This is very easy to do- you simply create some playlists in iTunes which contain the tracks you would like on the Nano then go into the iPod settings and tell iTunes to automatically sync those playlists on that particular iPod. Note that you cannot drag and drop music onto the iPod in iTunes if you have iTunes set to automatically update certain playlists. This is pretty self-explanatory.

Photos

The photo setup is equally easy. All I had to do was create a folder with my favourite images somewhere on my hard drive then point iTunes to this folder. iTunes creates miniature versions of your photos and stores them in a cache folder within the designated folder. Each of these photos is about 50kb (but in a proprietary format). iTunes also gives you the option to upload a full sized version of the photo onto the iPod- I would not do this unless there is a good reason to do so as they will take up a lot of space.

Other Setup

There are also options to sync calendar and contacts with outlook but I have not yet tried this so I cannot report back. You can also drag .txt files into a folder on the nano and it can display them on the screen.
When you have finished setting up the options on the nano, iTunes transfers everything across for you. The iPod icon flashes red and iTunes reminds you not to disconnect. When everything is synced, iTunes tells you that the update is complete.

And we’re off!

When the nano was charged, everything worked superbly as expected.
The album artwork is a lovely touch- when a song is being played, it displays a small picture of the album cover on the screen along with the rest of the track info. You can also enlarge this icon to see it better.

Rating

I particularly like to be able to rate my music. When a song is being played, you click the centre button three times then turn the click wheel to give the song a star rating (out of five). When you sync the nano with iTunes, the ratings are downloaded onto the computer which is pretty cool. Furthermore, you can create smart playlists such as the ‘top 25 songs’ to play your highest rated songs. These can then be synced onto the nano.

Games

I’m not a huge fan of the games on the nano- this isnt really why I bought it. However, the music quiz is great!
It plays a five second extract of a song, in a random place (not just the start of the song) and gives you a choice of five songs. As the time counts down, so do the points available for a correct answer. You have to identify the song being played and click the correct answer. The nano also removes options as the points decrease until eventually only the real answer is left (in which case you gain 0 points!). Whilst there is no high score board or similar feature that would increase the fun, this is a cool feature when you are bored.

zSkin

Later on in the day, I received a ‘zSkin’ for my nano which I used immediately. It is a clear silicon soft case that you slide your nano into. It also has a plastic screen protector. Essentially, once you have ’skinned’ your nano, it is impossible to scratch, both the screen and the nano itself, providing you dont keep taking it in and out of the skin (why would you need to do that!).
Surprisingly, the skin doesnt really impede the sensitivity of the click wheel, something I had previously feared. However, it does make some games slightly more tricky.

What I don’t like

Being used to using many open-source computer programs and even an Open-Source music player (see my post on the squeezebox), I do feel that the nano does deprive the user of a few ‘liberties’. For example, you practically have to use iTunes for everything that you do. There are only a couple of alternative applications available. The nano is also designed so that you cannot get your music ‘back’ from it. You can only put music on or remove it via iTunes. Apple has done this to prevent people from sharing their music collection with friends too readily, but it is quite annoying.
Furthermore, all the formats that the nano uses tend to be proprietary, such as the picture format used and the m4a (etc) music file formats. It would be much more user friendly if the pictures were in a conventional format such as Jpeg, so that the pictures could be viewed on other devices.
Finally, despite the fact that I know devices like iPods are not aimed at the technically adept user, I’m sure that Apple could include a few more controls on the nano side. It seems that you have to do practically everything via iTunes. As far as I know, you can’t even delete music from the iPod without using iTunes. This is a pain- if you wanted to use the device as a USB Storage device then you couldn’t free up space for some large files without iTunes.

Music Store Files

My other rant is about iTunes music store.
Whilst I use my iPod when I’m out and about, when I am back home I always use my Squeezebox or my PC which runs on Fedora Core 4 (linux). However, the Squeezebox will not play the protected files that you download from the iTunes music store and neither will linux machines (there being no official iTunes software for *nix systems.
This is not a fault of Slimdevices (the guys who make the Squeezebox), nor the fault of the linux community. It is Apple themselves who are responsible, as they will not sell the license to any other company to use their protected files. This is because Apple sells a product called AirTunes which offers similar functionality to the Squeezebox (play your MP3 collection wirelessly to a hifi). By not selling the license to slimdevices, AirTunes remains the only network music player that is able to play the protected music store files. This is pathetic. Moreso seeing as AirTunes is not even half as good as some of the other network music players out there.
The consequence of this is that if I wish to download music from the iTunes music store, I have to burn it onto a CD (or at least make a CD image) before ripping it back onto my computer as unprotected MP3 format. This is a real pain and is worth considering if you have a network music player and an iPod. Furthermore, if someone in your family has a non-apple portable MP3 player then they are unable to play the songs you download from the store.

Conclusion

Overall, it must be said that the nano is a lovely product and it is difficult to flaw it. Apart from the couple of mentions above (notably Apple taking the power away from the user), it is brilliant. I have not yet seen any other manufacturer come close to the iPod range and the nano will keep this trend going.
For £130, this is probably one of the best purchases I have made. Here are some pics.