Thoughts On The New iPod Nano And Classic

September 12th, 2007

AppleOver the weekend my wife’s work required the purchase of a new iPod Nano and iPod Classic so I got a chance to ogle both.

The most striking thing is how the top case (now metal instead of clear plastic) is beveled slightly. This adds a touch of class, and I must say (true to Apple form) the “fat” iPod Nano looks much better in the flesh than in blurry spy photos. The Nano is also extremely thin and the new metal case reminded me more of a precious object - a gem or one of those makeup mirrors.

Then JC (ever the early adopter) let me check out his iPod Classic. I spent a bit of time playing around with the new, more graphic intensive GUI. The album art is showcased in Cover Flow, but also appears in various menus. A list shows up in a column on the left and the album art drifts ever so slightly (Ken Burns effect?) in the right column. Also nice is in some of the list views, a tiny thumbnail of the cover art appears next to the item.

The other nice GUI change is the font has been updated to look darker and cleaner - definitely easier to read.

Adding all these items up, I don’t think I’ll be rushing out to get a new iPod, but I’m looking forward to the day my iPod Video craps out so I can buy another one. In the meantime, I’m now thinking I need to re-examine all the album art in my music collection. There are a lot of covers that are missing or others that are of low resolution which look bad in Front Row or will look bad on a new iPod or Apple TV.

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  • last.fm might be a good place to upgrade some of that album art
  • additionally now that I think of it if you were using a Windows machine I could whip you up a little app that would grab the album cover art from Amazon in about 30 minutes .. but then yer not but let me know if you want something like that.
  • JC
    One other thing about the new UI that no one else seems to be mentioning: Audiobooks are greatly improved. When you select an Audiobook, it gives you the option of resuming where you left off, or choosing from a list of chapters. And the chapter list continues to be available, as if it were a list of songs on an album (Very cool.) And the sound quality when playing the books at the "faster" speed is improved, too.

    Now if Apple would just get the Audiobooks out of the Music menu, like they did in iTunes, it'd be even better. You can work around it by customizing the Main and Music menus, but it should be set that way by default.

    Oh, and another awesome new feature. You can finally choose to shuffle directly from the "Now playing" song. When you press the center button, you get the different functions, like before, for quick seek, star ratings, etc. And now there's a new screen for choosing to shuffle songs, albums or neither. Much more convenient than going back into the Settings menu every time you want to turn shuffle on or off.
  • If you got a credit card available you can also get an iTunes account, then you have free access to letting all your cover art being updated for free. Makes things a lot easier.

    The new features though sound really cool, too bad though that my iPod is still quite young with just a year old or so, not worth it yet to buy a new one :P. But a couple years from now when Apple is a couple series further again and mine dies it'll be a surprise to see which features there are available for me at that time again :).
  • I went to Microcenter over the weekend and they had the new Nano in stock. I gotta agree that it does look a lot more appealing in person than it does in photos.

    Though, for my aesthetics, I prefer the taller versions. I may just have to pick one up on clearance.
  • The new iPod nano looks beautiful and works like a gem!
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