Product Reviews

Put it this way: everyone at MacUser now has 'iPod nano' at the top of their Christmas list. We always strive to maintain an authoritative, professional and critical eye when reviewing products, but we must confess to getting all emotional when we cracked open the tiny, matte black box in which the nano arrived.

There's no preparing you for how tiny it is. We've tried, by printing it at life size on this issue's cover, but it just ain't the same.

To touch and hold one for the first time is to fall in love with the whole idea of iPod all over again; without exception, everyone to whom we showed the nano had the same visceral reaction. Forgive us for gushing, but, really, you'll do the same the first time you see and hold one.

And then there's the capacity. It comes in both 2GB and 4GB sizes (both in a white and a black finish), and it's astonishing to think of how much music that means can be crammed into the tiny casing. Some colleagues from our sister PC titles, already grudgingly impressed by the looks of the nano, were justifiably blown away by the realisation of how many tracks could be stored.

It may look flimsy, but technology website Ars Technica reported running over the nano with a car, after which the diminutive music player still worked. Twice. We couldn't bring ourselves to do the same to ours, so we'll just take their word for it.

Let's scotch one concern before we go any further. The iPod mini line has now been scrapped by Apple, but before the introduction of the iPod nano, a 4GB iPod mini cost £139. The 4GB nano now costs £179, effectively raising the price of a 4GB iPod by £40. True, but not the whole picture. When the 4GB iPod mini was first made available in the UK in July 2004, it cost £179 as well, so even though a 4GB nano is more expensive than the immediately preceding 4GB mini, it's not quite the rip-off you might first think.

Part of the reason for that pseudo increase is the move from the small hard disks used in the mini line to the more expensive flash memory in the nanos. This brings benefits, though. First, such solid-state storage has no moving parts, so there's less to go wrong and zero chance of any skipping during playback, no matter how hard you shake the nano. Second, flash memory requires less power, as there are no moving parts to spin. The practical upshot of this isn't so much increased battery life - the quoted 14-hour playback time is in line with the rest of the iPod range as it stands - but that a smaller battery is required to produce a decent amount of playback time, which is another factor in shrinking the iPod.

Enough of this background stuff, though: you want to know what it's like to use. Frankly, it's a joy. If you've used any iPod other than the shuffle, you'll be right

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at home: Apple hasn't tampered with the perfect user experience formula it has concocted. Audiobooks, on-the-go playlists, solitaire, podcasts, the ability to rate tracks on the move, diary and address book and the rest of the stuff that made the iPod great are all there. The supplied earphones aren't stunning, but we like the handy positioning of the headphone jack on the bottom of the device. If you've never used an iPod, you're in for a treat.

Inevitably, the iPod nano is closely linked to iTunes. It's iTunes you'll use to import your existing music, organise it into playlists and generally get everything set up as you want it.

Plug in the nano and, after walking you through a setup guide the first time, your tracks are copied to it.

The iPod interface is legendary, but its elegance deserves another mention. That big circle on the front is the Click Wheel and, like a laptop's trackpad, it senses where your thumb is placed on it and acts accordingly. You circle your thumb round it to make selections and click the centre button to confirm. The whole shape tilts slightly in four directions to confirm play/pause, track forward and back, and menu functions. It's such a blessedly simple system that anyone can pick it up in seconds, and it's this as much as the look of the iPods that has made them so wildly successful.

The menu structures are simple, and that tiny, 1.5in colour screen is remarkably easy to read. We were worried it might prove impractical, but, in fact, it just made the screens on our full-size iPods look flabby.

As long as you have album artwork linked to the tracks in your iTunes library, the nano will display it as the track is playing.

Like the nano's chunkier siblings, it can also display photos, taking iPhoto's entire library, particular albums, or Jpeg, BMP, GIF, Tiff, PSD and PNG images from a specific folder and copying them to the device, optionally rescaling them so as not to waste space. The photos look great on the screen, and you can scroll through them as fast as you can dial your thumb.

The Dock connector on the bottom is identical to previous models, so the nano can connect to existing add-ons, although specific accessory designs may be incompatible.

There are a couple of features new to the iPod line. The clock feature has been improved, and you can now add as many clocks as you like for various cities; their faces turn black at night.

You can also lock the screen with a four-digit passcode - in a typically flashy Apple way - by turning the virtual knob of a safe door using the click wheel.

So far, so drop-dead gorgeous. There's only one fly in the ointment. While Apple's recent iPod offerings have been bundled with a USB cable, you have at least been able to buy a replacement that uses FireWire. Not so the nano. It will only transfer data over USB (you can charge it using a FireWire cable), which is bad news for the owners of older Macs. On a modern machine blessed with USB 2, it took six and a quarter minutes to fill a 4GB iPod nano. That time ballooned to an hour and a quarter when using USB 1.1, which is hardly convenient if you're in a rush.

There may be some people who will find the 60GB iPod or the 512MB iPod shuffle more appropriate, but many of us need look no further for a digital audio player. We really, really don't want to give it back.