Apple’s 4G iPod Nano Is Cool and Versatile

Jeremy Horwitz reviewed Apple’s newest iPod Nano for iLounge and gave it high marks for price, features and style. He calls it “an excellent new mid-range media player—one that continues to lead its competitors, and suffers only by comparison with larger, more expensive devices.”

The iPod nano occupies that mid-range space in Apple’s family of iPods. It is mid-priced: larger and higher-priced with more capacity than the screenless iPod shuffle. But it is smaller, more “aggressively priced” and packaged in a choice of beautiful colors that set it apart from the larger hard disk-based iPod classic or the flash-based iPod touch. Horwitz writes, “ It has just enough storage capacity to hold the average user’s entire collection of songs and/or some videos at respectable bitrates, though traditionally neither its screen nor its audio quality were first-rate by Apple’s standards. Users came to consider it the ideal workout-ready iPod because of its small size, flash-based storage, and unique compatibility with the Nike + iPod Sport Kit, a jogging sensor that tracks a runner’s performance.”

This fourth-generation iPod nano has replaced the nearly square shape of the third-generation, with an anodized aluminum “candy bar body” of the second-generation iPod nano. There are nine wonderful colors to choose from — including a very nice plum/purple — and a great price. This incarnation of the nano flips on its side to become taller than wide, and now has an accelerometer which detects the device’s orientation. Videos and games will now only play when the nano is in wide mode. Everything else functions in tall orientation.

There is a capacity change — it has been doubled. An 8G nano holds 2,000 songs or about 8 hours of video for £109.00. The 16G nano holds 4,000 songs or 16 hours of video for £149.00

The switch to a vertical screen orientation from the horizontal one has required re-engineering of the nano. Horwitz writes “The new menus have markedly larger on-screen text than before, yet display up to ten choices on the fourth-generation nano’s vertical screen versus nine on the prior nano. Additionally, the new nano can boost its font to an even larger size that has nine even larger choices; here, the text is as big as on the screen of the iPod classic. It appears that Apple can pick shortened menu words for the larger font size—a typo makes the game “Maze” display as “Mae” when the size is boosted—and there’s also a new voice prompting feature that lets visually disabled users navigate all of the menus, including song choices, with audio-overlapping voice prompting. This feature is activated in iTunes, downloading voice prompts directly to the iPod nano, and taking up space in the process; it works surprisingly well but won’t be desirable for most users, as it’s constantly playing on top of other audio.”

The nano can also sense its orientation and display certain content in its horizontal or vertical mode. This is thanks to the built-in accelerometer, which is a feature originally found in the iPhone and the iPod touch. “Photos, videos and games can be displayed in widescreen mode; photos can also be viewed in vertical mode. Extras, such as clocks, calendars, contacts, and notes, display only in vertical mode,” writes Horwitz. There are two additional features enabled by the accelerometer. The first is a menu option that allows you to activate “shake” mode, which lets you gently shake the nano in order to activate shuffled playback mode or navigate away from the current song. Although Horwitz said that he didn’t think much of it at first, it proves to be a useful feature when needing to change songs in a car, or when you need to change music quickly anywhere, for that matter. He also suggests that new iPod nano games might take advantage of the accelerometer for control.

So, the verdict? Horwitz thinks we’d be hard-pressed to find any other media play as cool and versatile for this price. He states, “If you’re looking for something small, full of features, and colorful, the fourth-generation iPod nano is a superb value. It’s worthy of our A- rating and high recommendation.”