The New iPod Nano
My previous first generation iPod Shuffle was well on it’s way to death - it didn’t play songs 90% of the time when first turned on, didn’t work on shuffle mode, was actually rusting & it’s armband was starting to fall apart. I coincidently also happened to lose it recently as well, so I was due for a new music player and anxious about the new iPod release rumors that had been circulating.
After a couple days of excitement about the new iPods Apple revealed this past Wednesday, I headed to the local Apple store to pick up a new iPod Nano to replace the Shuffle. I had planned on getting a green 4 GB model, but the clerk told me green was only available in the 8 GB size. I’m not sure if they don’t ship 4GB colored models or they just didn’t have any in stock, but could really care less about the color, so I picked up the 4GB plain aluminum/grey colored one instead, along with a matching armband for running. As Saturday was the first day the new iPods were in the store, I didn’t expect any accessories to be there. The store was busy, but I’d expected much worse. It hardly took any time to get a clerk to help & I was out the door in 15 minutes tops.
After opening the sharp looking packaging, I was a pleasantly surprised to find the Nano fully charged, but since I was on my way to RIT to visit my brother, wasn’t able to put any content on it until later that evening. Unbeknown to me, the Nano has support for games and includes three free by default - a trivia game, some form of solitaire & a funky circular Arkanoid/breakout-style game.
My Shuffle only had basic audio media support - there was no video, no menus to differentiate podcasts from music - well, no visuals at all. The new Nano includes the impressive looking Cover Flow, which picked up the covers for most of the albums I initially loaded. I have yet to upload any videos or photos, but hope to do so before showing it off to friends and co-workers. I also hope to utilize the video capability this fall hunting season to watch movies in the woods. Contacts and a calendar are built in as well, but I’ll likely never use these.
I’ve loaded up a bunch of NPR audio podcasts and Best of YouTube video podcast and am extremely impressed. The videos look sharp - and they’re just youtube flash quality. (The store was using The Italian Job to demo the video - it looked quite sharp!).
I have yet to see if there’s linux support for the new Nano, but may attempt to get iTunes running under Wine as the Apple rep for UB has said it works well.
It’s been a long time since I’ve enjoyed a personal purchase or piece of technology as much as I’ve enjoyed this one so far. I encourage everyone to take a peak at what Apple’s been up to the in the last couple years - this Nano is leaps and bounds better than my Shuffle of just a couple years ago. It’s intuitiveness is incredible.
I’d still love an iPod Touch. One of the things I’ve worked on a little for work at UB, is an implementation of iTunes U - a free service from Apple to allow schools to upload content to a portion of the iTunes Music Store set aside specially for them (I did some work integrating protection of portions of our setup with Shibboleth.) Aside from introducing the new iPods Wednesday, Apple also released support for downloading songs directly from the store from both the iPod Touch and the iPhone via the built-in wireless connectivity in them. Since iTunesU is just an extension of the iTunes Music Store, I hope there’s support for iTunesU downloads over wireless as well, but am curious if/how it will work on the Touch or iPhone if some form of http authentication is first required , especially shibboleth since there’s a lot of redirects involved. I’m hoping that my department will purchase a Touch for me to test with, but I haven’t received very encouraging responses so far - it is semi-legit after all…