Friday, February 3, 2012

Ipod Nano 6th Gen Review

So, about half a year ago, I decided to get back into exercise. I spent the first few months on an elliptical machine, but ultimately, my labors led me back to my first true love: running. Accompanying me on this journey was my trusty, faithful, and enormous ipod classic which holds my entire music collection. Admittedly, there is something deeply re-assuring about holding my entire music collection in a device which is about the size of a deck of playing cards, but after four miles of running, it was getting a little bulky. No matter what type of fitness band I bought to hold it, it would slip and get out of place. Putting it in the minimal pocket of my running shorts always seemed like a quick way to DBSD (death by sudden drop) it. Even holding it in my hand got a little annoying with the long distances. Not to mention, as some of my tech-savvy friends explained, all that jostling and jarring wasn't good for an ipod classic, which has moving parts.

Factoring in all these things, I made the decision to get something a little smaller and more form-factored towards running. I'd like to tell you that I seriously considered all the non-Apple stuff, but that would be a bold-faced lie. It ain't that I've drank the Jobs kool-aid or anything like that. It is just that I have maintained an itunes library for over half a decade now, perfectly organized with album art and beautiful tags. I am disinclined to abandon this work of art and reorganize all my stuff for a different player. There may be a PC-based music player out there that is affordable, stylish, and can cure cancer, but my laziness has precluded me from experiencing this wonder.

I briefly considered a Shuffle, but at my core, I am a control freak. I did not like the idea of not being able to see what I was listening to at any given moment. More importantly, I did not like the inability to quickly change said music in a flight of fancy.

This brought me to the Nano. Now, I have had a wealth of friends who have purchased the ipod Nano and loved it, so I felt like this was a pretty safe bet... and then I looked on Apple's website. Gone was the little gizmo that looked like the piglet version of the ipod classic. In its place was... well, for lack of better description, an electronic postage stamp.

It had no click wheel. I repeat, it had no click wheel. Now, I love me some click wheel. I thought that as an innovation, it was one of Apple's best. The click wheel brought a certain mindlessly intuitive ease to the use of an ipod. I don't doubt that this feature, paired with some really slick marketing, is what made the ipod the juggernaut of the portable audio set.

I stared at this wheel-less aberration, and suddenly understood what the crowd at Kitty Hawk felt like when they gazed upon the first airplane. A bit of research quickly revealed that the general public shared my uneasiness. The click wheel had become our technological equivalent of Linus' security blanket.

At first glance, this new contraption seemed a bit ridiculous. After all, what the heck could you accomplish with a touch-screen interface that was less than two inches wide? It just seemed like the people at Apple had decided to try and making a quick buck by forcing their ipod touch design onto a different model. Why abandon the click wheel?

The answer hit me in a flash. It's the only damn way you could make this thing any smaller. It lives right there in the name: Nano. The whole point is for it to be small. They had made it as thin as possible. The only way to make it smaller would be to merge the display and the interface into one thing, and that is exactly what they did.

Now, there were certainly some squalls of outrage because of this choice. Unlike the 5th generation, this Nano lacks a camera (and the ability to view videos, for that matter), games, and the built-in organizer function. Some might scratch their head that a future generation of a product does less stuff, but it does make sense. Think about it. Do you know a single human being that did any serious filming on an ipod Nano? Or used it as an organizer? All of these things are done way better by other devices.

On an ipod, these features sound like the sort of pointless bells-and-whistles a lazy group of designers would graft onto an already functional product in order to re-hash it and snag a sales boost.

That's the opposite of what happened with the 6th gen Nano. I think it is fair to say that the people at Apple, design wonks that they are, went back to the drawing board and asked themselves, "Why do people want this product?" And the answer is simple - it is a really small, really intuitive music-player.

And by that standard, this thing passes muster. It is ridiculously small. (In fact, the worst thing I could say about it is that you could easily lose it or accidentally toss it in the wash.) The storage is adequate to have a good range of music for your daily tasks, and the interface is pretty easy to learn and use. Battery life is decent so long as you aren't firing up the touch screen every two seconds. The fitness-related features are particularly nice, if you are into that sort of thing. The walking and running measuring/timing apparatus is surprisingly accurate, and the little post-workout "progress report" is a nice feature if you like to track your performance.

In short, it does everything I want it to do, and I feel like it was a good bargain for a little more than $100.






1 comment:

  1. I just bought a Nano as well to take on my trips w/me because it's compact, light and fits in my camera case for easy safe keeping and portability. It also holds more than enough music to keep me entertained for hours with my favorite songs from my iTunes library, which I've spent hours and hours building and creating. I had considered the iPod touch, but I really don't need all the features that gadget has because I have my smarty pants Droid phone and it would be just one more bulky piece of electronic hardware to carry around. Now if I could just get my laptop to recognize it (and my iPod) so I can load it up, that would be extremely gratifying!! Sometimes I wish I was a geek and had the time for research. Unfortunatly, I'm going to have to pay for someone to figure this out for me, hence my appointment tonight at the Apple store and if that doesn't work w/the Geek Squad at Best Buy.

    ReplyDelete