Two Weeks Later with the iPod nano

So it’s been more than two weeks since the iPod nano was unveiled to the public. That was one tragic month of moaning noises coming from geeks who’ve realized that their iPod mini’s are rendered prehistoric. The other type of moaning reverberated from those who’ve come to adore the pencil-thin iPod oozing with sex appeal (i.e. geek orgasm).

There is no hocus pocus to it – the iPod nano is a beautiful product that needs no marketing to sell itself. However, once you pass the honeymoon stage of gadget lust (for human couples this lasts from six months to one and half years), you start to find a few – yes just a few quirks you never saw before.

First, the iPod nano doesn’t support Firewire. You see, not everyone has USB 2.0. Read this love story from the iPod Garage.

I was devastated, of course. What she needed, I couldn’t give. I can do no better than USB 1.1. And my love for her, great as it was (and still is, though the infatuation has passed), could never be great enough to endure the pain of a slow 4 gig file transfer.

Second, if you really think about it, losing say 6GB of data for 2GB (or even 4GB) may be too huge a price to pay. The battle of the flash-based storage (the nano) versus hard drive based storage (iPod mini and the older iPods) is an uphill one. Cost is the key factor to consider in buying a flash-based player. Check out this comparison between flash and HD-based technology – you be the judge.

The single most important factor in any consumer system is cost. As long as the desirable features can be brought to the market for an affordable price, the product should succeed. The big trade-off is cost vs. features. It would be nice if the world would stand still, and a tidy answer to the question of costs could be derived. This is not the case, yet the dynamics of HDD and flash pricing are clear enough that we can draw some important conclusions that we can use to foretell the future.

Lastly, the iPod nano is still in essence the same digital music player we’ve all come to love with no improvements whatsoever in terms of audio output.

In our initial and admittedly limited testing of the iPod nano using high-end Ultimate Ears UE-10 Pro earphones, it did not appear that Apple had made significant improvements to the bass response of the new iPod over that of the color-screened iPod. Stated differently, this iPod is not likely to represent an improvement over its predecessors from an audio standpoint.

iLounge’s iPod nano review

As an added bonus, want to see how a nano fares against a car? Check this stress test out!

We placed the nano in the path of the car and drove over it with both front and rear tires. Driving over the nano produced sickening crunching noises which coincidentally sounded a lot like an LCD being crushed. After the first hit and run, the iPod’s display was not cracked but was showing some nasty vertical lines. Shockingly, the nano was still playing music and the controls still operated as expected, as we were still able to skip ahead, go back, pause, and play music!

Nano pwnage courtesy of Ars Technica