iPod Nano 3G 4 GB
The Apple iPod is perhaps the first name that comes to mind when you think of an MP3 player. To most people, there is the iPod or the CD player or no player at all. But how well does the iPod stand up in this day and age when players with more functionality and space can be had for half the price? Does the quality actually warrant spending more for less?Overview
The iPod nano 3rd generation is a radical step forward for MP3 players. It is no doubt one of the thinnest and smallest flash based MP3 players out there. The front of the player consists of the screen and touchpad, along with a coloured bezel of your choice. The back of the players, as with all other Apple MP3 players, is a highly reflective and polished surface touting a custom engraving (if requested), the Apple logo, and the obligatory "Designed by Apple in Californa" rights beside the "Assembled in China" text.
Touchpad
Like the newer iPod classics and the ones before, the key to the iPod experience is the touchpad. The touchpad is a plastic ring which is used to control all aspects of the player. This would include all the functionality minus the hold button. This technogy relies upon sensing your finger touching the ring and navigating based on that.
Screen
The player has 2 inch (5cm) colour wide screen, which supports a 320x240 resolution. It is quite bright, and is very usable in direct sunlight when set to the highest settings. Videos and pictures displayed on the screen are very vivid as well, and are practically the same as on a higher end LCD (sans resolution of course)
Battery
The battery in the Nano 3G is rated at 5 hours of video playback and 24 hours of audio playback. For the most part, this target was met. However, the player will drain the battery slowly when not in use. We left it for 5 days and it went down 1 bar when it was turned back on. This is in part due to the sleep mode of the player and in part due to the battery technology used.
Capacity
The iPod Nano 3G comes in 4GB and 8GB versions.
The Box
The box that iPod nano comes with is quite unusual. It is rather small, and it was hard to believe that such a small package could contain an mp3 player. It comes with the player, headphones, usb cable, dock adapter, and a paper manual. The pictures are self explanitory as to what it contains.
Software
The software used to put music onto the player is iTunes. With iTunes, it is sort of a love/hate relationship, where some people find it intuitive and others find it horrible and cluttered. We won't go into the details, but it suffices to say that the software is used to manage your Music, Movies/TV shows, podcasts, and games. The games are not free, and require you to buy each game seperately. On the other hand, most podcasts are free. There is an option to buy/rent movies and TV shows, where the price is fixed by the show producers.
User Interface
The user interface on the iPod has been updated between the 2nd generation and 3rd generation Nanos. The new interface is a sort of "split screen" interface, where the menu is always on the left hand side, and other information on the right. While this is interested, it does not add much functionality and is more of an aesthetic feature (the right side will show images of albums, pictures, or whatever setting you are hovering over). Also new to this interface is the "Cover Flow" feature, which allows you to browse through your music visually; however, the usefulness of this depends on how well you organize and tag your music.
Cover Flow
Cover flow is a unique feature on all the newer generation iPods, which allows you to visually scroll through the albums you have on your player. It is a very nice feature, but does depend on your music being tagged properly. Once this is done, it is quite a useful tool for finding albums quickly and visually by the album art and design.
Menu system
The menu system is quite interesting. For years, the iPod has been awing people with it's simplicity and elegance. While this has not changed significantly, the new menu system has become a web of settings and submenus.
The menu system in the newer iPods is very deep and somewhat complex to navigate through. While this was the case with most players before (minus the iPod), there are players now that actually beat the iPod in terms of simplicity. Granted that simplicity is not everything, and there are reasons why there are so many menu items: podcast, video, audiobook, and accessory setting have been building up over the years and have brough the player to this point.
An interesting thing about the player is that the clock is not shown unless you specifically go into the menu for the clock. However, when the player is playing music and the backlight fades, after a minute or two you will see the time show up, along with battery status, like that of a cell phone. Although faint, it is readable most of the time if you take a closer look at the player.
Hardware
The iPod Nano is based off a ARM based SoC (System on a chip), which provides all the functionality of the player (sans audio). It has 32 MB of RAM, which is quite hefty for a flash based player.
The audio chip is a Wolfson chip, which was also used in previous generations, while the touchpad sensor is made by Synaptic, which also produces touchpads for most laptops nowadays.
Sound Quality
While we have no exact test to measure sound quality, it is very close to that of the top of the line players in the market. That being said, the headphone provided with the player are junk. Once a decent pair of ear/head phones are used, sound quality is generally good. One thing that was noticable was that lower bitrate music sounded quite "tinny" and the volume had to be lowered in order to avoid very annoying sounds. On the other hand, players like the Zune seem to soften the sound more by default. However, the pre-set equalizer settings on the player provided a way of fixing this. Generally, very good sound quality overall.
Conclusion
While this is a very nice and high end MP3 player, it is quite overpriced for what it does. From a feature standpoint, it is very low end, and does not even include an FM tuner by default. While there are arguments that a radio is not needed, the price that the player is set at demands that it have at at least some "premium" features. However, it is an improvement from the past series, and is quite well designed. It has a very intuitive interface, and appeals to many people.
Value: 4/10
Quality: 9/10
Design: 10/10
Interface: 8/10
Overall: 7/10