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Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983
T e c h n o f i l e
Less is more: Apple introduces a thin 4-gigabyte iPod that shows photos, too
Sept. 18, 2005
By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2005, Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2005, The Post-Standard
Parents got bad news at the start of the school year. Costs are up -- costs of keeping up with the iPod, that is.
Not that the new iPod Apple introduced this month is more expensive than the one it replaces. Apple's smarter than that. It costs the same, more or less. But it's much slimmer, far lighter and immeasurably better in its resistance to shock and vibration.
Best of all, it's cooler. 'Way cooler.
And that's all the world's 4.5 billion iPod fanatics need to know. Mom and pop, the credit card, please. This hit on your Visa bill's going to be a big one: $249 for the college kid who wants the higher-capacity version, able to store 1,000 songs, and $199 for the ninth grader who'll settle for the 500-song version.
Call it progress, Apple style. Technically, the new model Apple introduced, called the iPod nano, is a knockout, thinner than a pencil and weighing so little you could carry it all day and mistake it for the three Wheat Thins you stuck in your pocket after lunch. It's also the first medium-capacity iPod that uses chip-based memory storage instead of a tiny hard drive. Tossing the nano into a backpack 365 times won't harm it a bit.
The larger-capacity iPod nano has 4 gigabytes of chip-based memory; the other model has 2 gigabytes. Both can be used as ultra-portable drives just like iPods of old, but the 4-gigabyte version is better suited for that kind of use. (You simply plug an iPod into your computer's accessory port, treat it like a hard drive and even boot from it if your computer is a Mac. Some iPods use a FireWire port and others, including the nano, use a USB port.)
Apple also introduced a cell phone that has an iPod built in, more or less. The cell phone/iPod, the ROKR ("rocker," of course), is made by Motorola and is available only to Cingular customers. It costs $249 if you sign up for two years of Cingular service.
The ROKR seems underwhelming, perhaps because it actually IS underwhelming. It can only store 100 songs and won't let you buy music by cellular carrier from the iTunes store. You have to synchronize the ROKR's music content by connecting a cable from the phone to your computer (Windows or Mac). Surely Apple and Motorola will come up with a revised model next year that does all this wirelessly.
Back to the iPod nano. Apple's fascination with lower-case names notwithstanding (the company has a Mac mini and an iPod mini in addition to the iPod nano), the nano has all the functionality of the iPod mini, including the clever click wheel for navigating your music, notes and calendar.
The nano is also a photo viewer, storing thousands of pictures. Although the color screen is small, photos look gorgeous. You can show individual pictures or run a slide show.
A couple of Web sites devoted to the secret workings of iPods have reported that the nano has what seems to be a built-in recording function so you can capture FM broadcasts (with an accessory FM tuner) or voice notes (with a suitable accessory microphone). Accessories of that kind are popular with older iPods. (Apple is always coy about extra functions it builds into iPod models, for reasons no one can figure out.)
The nano's sound quality should be better than any of the older, hard-drive based iPods, too. Apple changed the audio circuitry for lower battery consumption and higher audio fidelity. In the first model that got that change, the iPod shuffle, the improvement was dramatic.
Apple's iPod family ranges from the shuffle, a stick-of-gum size player with up to 1 gigabyte of memory, to very-high-capacity iPods with hefty hard drives built in. Software that comes with iPods, called iTunes, works with both Apple OS X Macintosh computers and Windows PCs.
When you plug the player into your computer, the software automatically synchronizes music already stored on the computer with the contents of the player. Calendars on Macs and Windows PCs are also synchronized automatically.
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