iPod Video

Here's a prediction: in precisely 91 days' time, many people will be peeling back the wrapping paper on a Christmas present to reveal a perspex rectangular box about the size of two decks of playing cards.

Inside they will find a compact device in one of five colours: silver, turquoise, aqua green, black or red.

It will sport a 50mm screen that delivers 320x240 resolution, a familiar white click wheel and, on the bottom edge, a sliding switch, a dock connector and an earphone jack.

Under the hood, it will have a 4GB or 8GB drive. The smaller capacity device will hold about 1000 songs, or 3500 photos or four hours of video. Double that, for the bigger one.

Merry Christmas, hope you like your iPod nano.

You don't have to be a clairvoyant (or on the Apple payroll) to make that prediction. Apple has sold about 100 million iPods since launching them in October 2001.

The iPod has already become one of the world's most successful consumer gadgets, commanding between 60 and 80 per cent of the digital music player market, depending on which figures you use.

And Apple's new iPod nano - launched this month - seems destined to perpetuate that dominance.

The nano is yet another head-turning addition to a range that looks and feels great and now comes with many more features.

The new nano continues to reflect Apple's ethic of minimalism and its aversion to buttons.

The designers of the first iPod famously threw away the concept of a dedicated on/off button and it's still missing - as is the FM radio function and remove-it-yourself batteries that you find in many other players.

The new model is wider and chunkier than its predecessor, a change forced upon the designers because of the need to accommodate the new video functionality previously found only in the larger, more expensive iPods.

The screen is small but very sharp. Still, I find that viewing the screen for more than 10 minutes at a time leaves my vision a bit fuzzy. But that might just be me.

However, it's probably better suited to viewing two- to four-minute-long music video clips than it is to watching full-length movies.

One big change to the interface is the addition of the Cover Flow feature that Apple brought out with the iPhone, which was launched in June. This allows you to flick through an image gallery of the album covers, which it downloads from the internet, instead of just a list of names - although you still have that option.

The nano also comes pre-loaded with a couple of games including a trivia quiz, a Minesweeper-type game and a solitaire game.

The bad news? The new shape means that you won't be able to use some of the accessories made for older-style iPods. Older video cables also reportedly won't work on this model. Nor will games previously purchased through iTunes. The lack of backwards compatibility might some day come back to haunt Apple.

Bottom line: It's true, good things come in small packages. With the added video features, the nano has become much more than just a digital music player.

 

Labels: Reviews