So, it's coming upto christmas time... a time that, for many years how has been synonomous with another incarnation of apples iPod nano.... formerly mini?

When the first iPods came out they were an overnight success, changing the way consumers thought about music and ever since, apple has being trying to shock the world with each successive attempt. Personally, I think this time they've pushed a bit too far.

For me, every successive generation of the iPod nano has improved upon its predecessor, becoming more sleek, easy to use, intuitive and feature packed. But ...in this occasion what the new nano is, is essentially an iPod touch thats been shrunk. I perhaps would not have taken such issue with it if it had just been given a different name

PRO's:

*NEW FEATURES: the 6th generation nano has more featuees than ever, curiously enough apple has even chosen to include an FM radio tuner. A useful addition, but perhaps DAB would have been more appropriate. Nevertheless it's nice to have the option, it also works on a sky plus kind of mode, where you can pause for upto about 10 minutes and then play back. Very useful when you have to answer the phone or the likes. The most interesting feature that is now included is one that i feel deserves its own point....
*BUILT IN PEDOMETER: for a while now apple has been selling a piece of Nike equipment as an addon to the iPod... however in this new nano, the pedometer is built into the device, and the data can be uploaded to a website (so i'm told...... im yet to try it out). This could be pretty useful for anyone who uses the ipod to take walking or jogging and might certainly pull some more "older" people from buying the device
*INTUITY: with the last generation, apple introduced the ability to interact with your music by shaking the nano, if you gave it a bit of a giggle you'd find that it shuffled your songs. This new nano retains this functionality but improves upon it, you can do more by moving the little square about. ]

CON's:

*THE TOUCH SCREEN: this year, it feels asif everything has became touch screen. I welcome this in 90% of cases. But this screen really isnt ideal. One of the things I loved about my old nano was that I could take it out in any weather and pretty much it would cope.... Take this thing out on a humid day and you wont be able to do a thing. Whereas with the iPhones screen, it's big enough for some error.. with this the screen is so small that unless you have rather petite thumbs youll find things often dont go as planned. Certainly its easy to accidentally press the wrong icon on the homescreen
*THE EARPHONES: apple tries so hard to improve its products. But they seem completely unwilling to make any REAL adjustments to their headphones. They still have the flimsy look to them and poor sound quality and generally break after a month of heavy use..

OVERALL:

The new iPod Nano does have some really quite nifty features and certainly re-invents the wheel once again. Undoubtedly, like myself, many of you will replace your 5th generation nano purely out of habit. Nevertheless with the new featueres such as radio and pedometer, more and more people will be tempted into the lure of buying an iPod