Grab a standard American business card. Now, get a pair of scissors and trim the long side of the card by 20 percent. That’s nearly all the space you need to hold over 1,000 songs, plus audio books, podcasts and photos if you buy Apple Computer’s newest iPod model, the gorgeous and sleek iPod nano.
This latest iPod was publicly revealed last week. It’s not only beautiful and incredibly thin, but I found it exceeds Apple’s performance claims.
In fact, the nano has the best combination of beauty and functionality of any music player I’ve tested – including the iconic original white iPod.
Available in classic iPod white, or a lustrous black (my favorite), the nano is not only small, it’s stunningly skinny – about the thickness of five credit cards stacked on top of one another. That means it can be carried easily in even the snuggest of clothing and the smallest of purses, and worn comfortably during exercise. You could even carry it in a wallet, if you were sure you wouldn’t sit on it.
Yet the nano, which starts at $199 in the middle of the iPod range, contains key features previously available only on the largest, costliest iPods. These include a sharp color screen, the ability to display the album covers for the songs it’s playing, and the ability to store a user’s photos and display them in slide shows accompanied by music.
Also, despite its small size, the nano holds plenty of songs and can play them for a long time. The base $199 model has two gigabytes of storage, which Apple says can hold 500 songs. A second model, at $249, has four gigabytes of storage and can hold 1,000 songs, Apple claims. The company says this slip of a player somehow packs in a large enough battery to play continuously for 14 hours.
In my tests, I found that the nano’s battery lasted a bit longer than Apple claims – 14 hours and 18 minutes. And I was easily able to pack around 1,200 songs, plus a couple dozen photos, into the $249 model, because most older pop and rock tunes tend to be shorter than the notional song Apple uses to calculate capacity.
Apple is also shipping some optional accessories for the nano, including colored rubber covers, called “tubes,” an armband and a desktop dock. But the coolest accessory is a $39 lanyard with earbuds built-in at the neck. I found it to be perfect not only for exercising, but for walking around with the nano.
Overall, in my tests, the iPod nano performed as advertised, or better. I found no significant flaws or downsides. The only quirks are that the headphone jack is on the bottom, because there isn’t room for it on the top. That odditiy doesn’t matter much. In fact, the bottom-mounted headphone jack makes the optional lanyard earbuds possible, and keeps the screen oriented properly when you’re wearing them.
Despite its small size, the nano sounded as good as any other iPod, and is packed with plenty of audio power.
In fact, during my tests, I dropped the nano several times, deliberately, from a height of about 3 feet, and it didn’t miss a beat. I also wore it around my neck on the lanyard during a couple of hours of pounding treadmill exercise, and it never skipped or froze.
There are dozens of small, flash-based music players, but I haven’t seen any that combine the nano’s size and features.
In my tests, the nano synchronized perfectly with both a Mac and a Windows PC running Apple’s iTunes software, and I was able to easily buy songs from iTunes and play them on the nano.
All I can say is: It sure is small, and it sure is cool.
Walter Mossberg writes about personal technology for The Wall Street Journal.
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