Don't Touch My iPod! I've just Polished It! (Apple iPod nano 4 GB)

Member Name: Nibelung

Product:	Apple iPod nano 4 GB
Date:	15/07/06 (486 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Very compact. Superb design. Integration with iTunes. Good range of after-market accessories.

Disadvantages: Easily marked, needs cover of some kind, thereby ruining its looks. iTunes unique AAC format

I’ve not really had any strong hankering for a personal ‘mp3 player’, since I’m not a great fan of headphones or sitting next to someone wearing them on public transport. On the few occasions when I have used a personal stereo to while away a long train journey, I find it equally annoying that my travelling companion will then pick the precise moment I don the phones to start talking to me, and since I can’t lip read, I end up taking them back off again with a slightly tetchy ‘What?!’

However, their ability to store large amounts of your own music choice is still undeniably attractive, and you don’t HAVE TO play them via headphones exclusively – more of the options later.

Having changed my car recently and discovered that the CD slot in the radio will accept a CD-ROM of mp3 files convinced me that mp3s were ‘OK’ and therefore the way ahead. After all, if an 800 mbyte CD-ROM could hold a dozen albums, then a 4 gigabyte mp3 player would hold about 60.

I’M LEANING THAT WAY

I've never had an Apple Mac PC, but I’ve always held their styling in the highest regard – the ‘Bang & Olufsen’ of computing I guess. Therefore an iPod was always going to be at the top of my list even if they do seem to attract criticism for being dearer than the rest just for looking nice.

THE TAIL WAGGING THE DOG

Then whilst browsing eBay, I found an accessory for the iPod Nano that convinced me once and for all that this was my music player of choice.

The accessory in question is made by a firm of after-market manufacturers called Griffin, and it’s called the iTrip. It allows for the iPod Nano to be played through any nearby FM stereo car radio on a frequency of your choosing, i.e not one that someone’s using! I suspect this is not strictly legal, since it involves unlicensed radio transmission; however it only carries about 10 feet especially inside a steel box i.e.car, so it’s hardly likely to be picked up by anyone else.

The implications are great – not only can I now store 60 albums worth of music for the car, but playback is entirely cordless, and the player is so small and integrates with the Griffin iTrip so neatly as to easily hide them as one entity in the sunglasses tray when not in use.

It may seem strange to allow an accessory to steer my choice of machine but if it’s a dinky cordless juke-box you’re after, look no further.

IPOD NANO 4GBYTE – FIRST IMPRESSIONS

Phrases like ‘Bloody hell, neat, innit?’ come to mind. For a start it’s only 7 mm thick, but therein lies a problem. Don’t put it in your back pocket and sit down unless you want an ‘iProbablywontworkagain’! Its front panel carries a scaled-down version of the superb iPod thumbwheel for navigation.

Its screen is really clear and in good quality colour – well to start with it is. I can see keeping the screen scratch-free becoming a real problem, since it is totally flush with the front panel in general. No doubt this is the reason for the wealth of ‘jelly-like’ rubber cases made for it - at least these keep the screen slightly recessed and more out of harm’s way. My Nano is black, so its immaculate hi-gloss finish is particularly prone to looking heavily fingered compared to the white version. Having said all that, the design is a triumph of understatement, what with its polished etched stainless steel back and just the general feel of its build-quality. It certainly does give off the aura of a useful piece of ‘jewellery’, rather like Canon’s IXUS cameras or something from the drawing boards of the Porsche Design Group.

Even the previous ‘baby’ iPod (the Mini) could have 4 gigabytes of memory, so any replacement that does nothing to enhance storage sizes needs to be better in other respects, and the Nano doesn’t disappoint.

For a start, the Nano is the first iPod with 4 gigabytes of memory to use ‘flash memory’, not a tiny hard drive to download chunks of music to a smaller buffer memory. Therefore with no electric motors and no other moving parts, its maximum battery life is up from the nominal 8 hours of the older Mini to an equally nominal 14 hours in the Nano, and that’s despite being even dinkier with much less room for a battery! As a result, it’s also entirely jog-free, which is useful for those that like to take a five mile run down the Thames tow-path clutching their Evian as they go, but I too am ‘entirely jog-free’, and I wouldn’t dream of wearing one whilst cycling either (unless I’d just been told I’ve only got 2 weeks to live).

Having a colour screen means that it is now suited to other file types and it can be used to store jpeg photos and even some movie formats, the latter taking a dreadful toll of storage capacity. Of course, it’s not really a multi-media player in the accepted sense but who knows, I may find some use for its picture storage?

GETTING TO GRIPS – AT LAST A NEW USE FOR THE THUMB*!

(*Other than texting, that is)

Controlling any iPod I’ve ever seen involves that thumbwheel in the centre with its centre button and four ‘cardinal points’, these being Menu (at the top), left and right cursors, and Play/Pause at the bottom. The centre button is the ‘Enter’ control. There’s also a ‘hold’ switch along the top rim of the machine to stop you switching it on accidentally (say whilst in a shirt pocket), and the famous unique docking station connections are along the bottom edge.

Moving up and down menus (yes, folks, it’s menu driven like just about anything else these days) or even altering the playback volume is done by a gentle fondling of the thumbwheel ring exerting nothing but finger tip pressure around the arc of the dial itself. It takes a bit of getting used to, but once acquired it’s an easy skill.

DELVING A BIT DEEPER

Unlike a lot of other music players, you cannot just use Windows Explorer to drag’n’drop likely looking music files to disc and expect to find them in the iPod’s menu system. Yes, you can dump files to the iPod for the purpose of transporting them, rather as you would with a flash drive, but no, you can’t see (or hear) them en route.

Getting music to your Nano involves loading the iTunes software that comes with the kit. Initially, my heart sank, thinking I’d committed myself to a lifetime of BUYING on-line music from one source, but I was confusing this with the iTunes On-Line store with which the software links almost a tad too seamlessly, especially if you are silly enough to let someone else charge to your account. To be fair, the iTunes store e-mails you with a confirmation of everything you’ve bought on a daily basis, so punishment of the guilty can be swift.

On first load, the iTunes software scans your machine for media files, the predominance of which, hopefully, will be music files, although it does log movie files too.

Using the ID3 tag information contained within each mp3 file (if they’ve been created correctly), it does its best guess to list them by artist, album title, track title and genre. You are free to alter these or remove them from the list. iTunes can, on occasions, find some right old dross from your c:drive which you’d no doubt forgotten, and likewise in my case, a few gems I’d lost too! I then excluded all movie files as these can eat up the memory at a prodigious rate.

Fortunately, although the Nano can store photos too, iTunes doesn’t add every single jpeg file on disc. Adding photos is a separate event.

It pays to trim the ‘library’ list before connecting your Nano, otherwise all of this will transfer to the iPod during the ‘synching’ process. On reflection, it pays to tidy up your c:drive of unwanted music files before you even install the software, since taking them out later from the ‘library’ that iTunes builds up can be a laborious business.

Once downloaded to the Nano, your stored files are presented firstly on a top level menu as:-

Music
Photos
Extras
Settings
Shuffle Songs
Now Playing

Delving into ‘Music’, gets you to:-

Play-lists
Artists
Albums
Songs
Genres
Composers
On The Go (this allows for a “quick’n’dirty” play-list to be created simply by clicking on songs listed elsewhere in the menu.)

From here it’s easy to pick what you want and get on with the order of the day, i.e. listening to something!

The ‘Playlists’ item is really useful – this takes you through to a further, and hopefully last sub menu with such items as :-

90’s music
My Top Rated
Recently Added (they all are at the moment!)
Recently Played
Top 25 Most Played (until I use it more, these tend to be the same as ‘Recently Played’)

OK, so we’ve finally got to listen to something.

The iPod earphones are I have to say, pretty good even if I don’t like wearing phones of any kind. Volume is easy to adjust by running a finger lightly round the menu dial as if it’s a virtual rotary control and the on-screen information of what you’re listening to is very clear on the lovely little but sharp colour screen. There are no bass and treble controls, but as is so frequently the case these days, equalisation (EQ) can be altered to suit the genre of music – dance, classical, rock, singing in the bath* etc.

(*I lied)

It’s difficult to comment directly on sound quality, since the way in which each compressed file was made can alter the quality.

For instance, all iTunes that I’ve so far bought or downloaded for free (legally I might add) seem to be compressed at the 128kbits/second rate which is pretty good, although the ‘near CD quality’ as defined by my preferred CD-to-mp3 software is 320 kbits/second, the latter producing somewhat bulkier files, so the whole concept is a pay-off between getting anywhere near the quoted ‘1000 songs’ as advertised by Apple and acceptable quality when played through something other than the tiny ear phones supplied.

I do feel that Apple’s quote of ‘1000 songs’ is very misleading. Maybe ’50 hours of music (at a normal compression rate)’ would be fairer since there’s no way you’d get 1000 copies of the choral bits of Beethoven’s 9th, and I guess some would define that as a ‘song’.

A further bone I have to pick with the iTunes software is its ability to ‘consolidate’ all your existing music files into the iTunes directory.

‘Great idea’, was my first thought, ‘that’ll make it easy to back them all up onto DVD-Rs for safe keeping’. Don’t forget that if you get serious and actually start PAYING for downloads, you need to preserve your investment. So off I set merrily copying all my existing music that I’d so carefully shepherded into a logical directory structure on my d:drive over to the iTunes directory on c:drive, to be met with a ‘file name too long’ error message. Did it tell me which file name was too long? Did it hell! So now I’ve no idea at what point the process stalled nor where to restart manually using Windows Explorer – thanks a lot, Apple (or is it Micro$oft to blame?)

Another anxious moment occurred yesterday when I realised that there’s a newer firmware version for the iPod Nano than was actually loaded. As a rule, it’s always a good idea to use the latest version, and since there was a handy little utility for handling this, I launched into the exercise with ‘gusto’ (it’s like pesto, but gives you wind!).

Taking due care not to disconnect the machine during the process, the all-clear to disconnect it never came, leaving me with the option of risking turning off the PC at bed time. Of course, this was entirely the wrong thing to do, and I was immediately present with a Nano that thought it only had half of its disk capacity spare, but had no songs on board. A few anxious moments later, the help desk (yes they’ve got one with REAL people on the other end) was talking me through the process of reformatting the disk, and all was well, even if it did mean ‘syncing’ the Nano to my PC again.

Top marks to Apple for live support.

It’s worth noting that any iTunes you download, having paid for them in the iTunes store are in the AAC (protected) format, which is Apple’s exclusive form of compressed music file. That means that ‘aac’ protected files are only playable in iPods, as far as I can see, and are not even copy-able. Strangely, you are allowed to use iTunes software to create a normal audio CD from the files, from whence they could, in theory be ‘ripped’ back to mp3 files, so it’s not infallible. Unprotected AAC files can be converted to mp3 by such shareware utilities as Easy CD-DA Extractor.

You’ll no doubt have noticed by now (that’s if you’re still awake), that it’s difficult to separate an opinion of an iPod from that of iTunes. It confuses the hell out of me too. It’s almost as if the iPod is merely the on-the-go manifestation of iTunes, returning to base for refuelling every now and then.

Talking of ‘fuel’, I’m not convinced that there really are 14 hours of battery life, but this can depend on so many factors, like how long before the screen backlight cuts out, how loud you play it etc. I don’t suppose Apple are unique in quoting the best possible figure.

OTHER USEFUL BITS – ‘NOT JUST A MUSIC PLAYER’

Thanks to the fact that the software mates with Outlook Express to intercept its e-mail/address book, loading contacts couldn’t be easier – just follow the prompts to import all your e-mail addresses and phone numbers to the iPod.

Adding other info, like passport number, credit card emergency telephone numbers and all those other things you wished you’d remembered before your bags went astray somewhere between here and Bangkok is just a question of creating a text file and dropping it to the Notes directory via Windows Explorer – it’s just a pity that it’s not a phone; oh yes and how about throwing in a GPS/Sat-nav too? Now THAT WOULD be some gadget! No doubt one’s on the stocks as I speak.

Owing to the minuscule ‘commemorative postage stamp’ screen size, its use as a photo slide show player or especially a movie player is limited, although it is possible to buy an A/V connection kit to run a larger monitor.

However, as the transporter of such files, it’s as useful as any other flash drive, and when not connected to iTunes specifically, it shows up as a drive letter within My Computer/Windows Explorer, allowing for all the usual draggin’n’droppin’.

‘Podcasts’ are also well worth the effort to set up, turning iTunes into what is effectively a VCR for radio programmes – I only really got into these by missing all but the last 5 minutes of Punt and Dennis’ ‘Now Show’ on Radio 4, only to hear those fateful words ‘and if you want to hear that again…..www.bbc.co.uk….podcast…blah blah blah’

I searched the BBC web site for the link to the relevant ‘podcast’, pasted it into the appropriate box in my iTunes software et voilà, I’m subscribed to a weekly check for new version of the programme and I can now listen to the whole 30 minutes, either on my PC or on my iPod.

I look forward to the return of ‘I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue’, so I can do the same there!

USEFUL ACCESSORIES

I wouldn’t necessarily say that it’s 100% vital to buy genuine Apple add-ons. For example, I picked up a spare PC-iPod sync lead in Poundland for…oh….errrr….. a pound I think it was. Then, by buying a cigarette lighter-to-USB converter for £5 on eBay, I’m able to match this to the sync lead and power the iPod in the car. Both of these are white, so at least they LOOK like the genuine article.

The Griffin iTrip cost around £20-30 on eBay too. This particular version is exclusive to the Nano, although other versions exist. It acts as a cradle for the Nano, adding to its thickness more than any of its other dimensions and requires no external power source, taking a tiny drain from the Nano itself. Altering the output frequency so as not to clash with a real station is easily done, all via the Nano’s screen. Then all you need to do is set your car radio to the same frequency you’re away, listening to ‘Radio iPod FM’ without a wire in sight. I have now tried this out with my home hi-fi via its FM tuner, but ironically, since its aerial is two floors away in the loft, results aren’t too good – in the car, the aerial is somewhat nearer! In fact it works better in the kitchen with the mini hi-fi that only has one of those bits of wire Blu-Tac’d to the wall for an aerial.

There is also a wealth of after-market cases, some in hard aluminium, for around £8 rather like those hardened spectacles boxes – I know, I just won a bid for one on ebay!.

Radio heads may like to know that there’s an official Apple plug-in radio package which unfortunately lengthens the phones lead, partly because some it now acts as an aerial.

Bose make a VERY impressive-sounding docking station for the Nano, and indeed for most iPods with a docking connection. You begin to wonder whether a full-blown hi-fi is necessary once you’ve heard one of these in action.

SUMMARY

A 4-gigabyte music player (and other media files). Probably around 50 hours of music (if no movie or picture files are added)

Colour screen

Costs around £140-£150 using shopping robots. Mine came from Amazon.co.uk for £146, post free.

Excellent build quality and elegant design

Good sound quality from supplied headphones – even better when linked to a bigger system or bigger phones.

Good range of after-market accessories.

Only loadable via iTunes software, but it’s pretty comprehensive, so I don’t see this as a limiting factor, although having all downloads in a unique (AAC) format is a pain.

VERY dinky, only 7 mm thick and 90 mm long by 40 mm wide.

Just one trouble – my wife wants one too, now!

Summary: 4 gigabytes of flash memory=long battery life. Apple's smallest 'proper' iPod yet!

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