Apple iPod nano (5th gen, 16GB) review

It must be tough working in Apple's iPod development team. The pressure to keep improving must be unbearable, when even a two-year old Apple product would wipe the floor with most other portable audio players – at least from a design point of view. With the new iPod nano, Apple seems to have recognised that fact, and rather than change the shape once more, it has focused instead on adding new features.

Thus - aside from a new polished finish to replace the old anodised one – the nano looks very much the same as it did before. The front and rear are ever-so-slightly curved, the edges wrap in a seductively smooth arc around the player's long edges, while the top and bottom edges end in a sharp, clean cut-off. It's still a slippery little fellow and, at times, holding it can feel a bit like trying to hold onto that last translucent slip of soap in the shower.

Video killed the audio star?

Flip the nano over, and you come face to face with the biggest addition – a lens for a video camera, which allows the player to shoot 640 x 480 video (recorded in MPEG-4 MP4 format at 2.6Kbits/sec). The lens is unfeasibly tiny – it has to be in a device this small - and yet, somehow, the quality isn't that bad.

We tested it using the same series of tests we use on pocket video cameras such as the Flip Mino and, in general, footage looked clean and was largely clear of the horrid noise we had been expecting – better than what you get from most mobile phones. It's far from perfect, though, and with footage looking very murky and washed out in some circumstances, it shouldn't be viewed as a replacement for a dedicated device.

But the big problem for the nano is that it's not the most natural video camera to use. The lens is positioned on the rear, right in the bottom right hand corner as you look at it from the front, and this means there are only a couple of ways you can hold it without obscuring the lens with your fingers. It also means the natural way of holding it – in portrait mode with screen up top and controls at the bottom – isn't possible either.

Finally – and most remarkably - you can't use iTunes to drag video off the nano. This is achieved by first turning on the Enable disk use option in iTunes, then dragging the video files off the device manually. Has Apple started employing ex-Microsoft employees?