Once I got some songs copied over to the iPod, it was time to demo the unit and see if I had thrown away my money or not.
The interface on the iPod itself is pretty intuitive, as you would expect from a finely-honed Apple device these days. The screen is sharp, the colours are nice, the font is readable.
I really like the click-wheel, although I must say that sometimes it misbehaves a little bit on me. Sometimes I'll scroll through to a particular item, yet when I remove my finger, the selection changes to either the item before or the item after.
I'd heard some horror stories about Cover Flow not working all that well on the Nano, but I have to say that it seems to work pretty well for me. There are times when you scroll through the albums really fast and the Nano hasn't had a chance to load in the cover art in time - maybe that's what they were referring to. I haven't seen Cover Flow on an iPhone, so I have no previous reference for correct behaviour.
Of course, the most important aspect of the Nano is the sound quality. I'm no audiophile (if I was, would I be using MP3s in the first place?), but the sound quality on the Nano seems pretty good to me. Definitely better than the iRiver. Earbuds/headphones make a lot of difference, so it could just be that the earbuds that come with the Nano are better than the ones that came with the iRiver. In any case, I'm very happy with the audio quality.
One thing that the iPod can do is normalize the volume from the various tracks. Depending on how you have iTunes set up (or how your MP3s were originally created), the volume levels from all of the tracks may be different. With the flick of a virtual switch, the Nano will supposedly adjust the volume levels from track to track to keep them consistent. I've tried this briefly, but I have to say that I wasn't all that thrilled with the results. I'll definitely do some additional testing, but I have a feeling that I'll get better results by configuring iTunes to do the normalization at rip time.
A totally useless feature that I like anyway - when you select a source category (music, podcasts, movies, etc), the Nano will start up a slideshow using the various cover art that you've supplied (or opening frame to a movie or whatever).
I showed nervousness about iTunes in the previous posting, but now I see why it wants to be the keeper of all things. iTunes takes all of that song data and uploads it to the iPod, allowing you to see all of that information, as well as search for songs based on title, artist, album, and composer. I tend to just do album searches, but it's still nice to have the option.
Video playback was not really much of a factor in my choosing the Nano - the idea of watching a movie on a 2-inch screen wasn't appealing in the least. However, since it had the functionality, I figured I've at least test it out.
You can't just put any video onto the Nano - it first needs to be in the correct format. iTunes supposedly will convert a video automatically when you import it, but so far I haven't been able to get that to work. Unable to get a video onto the Nano, I did some googling to see what I could do. It turns out that there are all kinds of video convertors for the Nano.
I found a free one called Videora, installed it, and gave it a whirl. I didn't want to wait around all day for the conversion to finish, so I selected the Robot Chicken Star Wars double-episode for the test source. I used all of the default settings in Videora and let 'er rip.
It took a while, but eventually it finished. I loaded up iTunes and the newly-converted video appeared in the video library (which is how I knew the auto import stuff wasn't working, because it never showed up on the library). I synced up the Nano and there it was in the Movies menu. Not expecting much, I started up the video.
I was amazed.
Yes, it's still a rinky-dink 2-inch screen, but I was amazed at how watchable the video really was. I don't think I could watch a lot of stuff on it, but I could probably sit through a movie on a flight.
Of course, the converted videos only look good on the Nano screen. If you use iTunes to view the video, the quality is quite awful.
Unfortunately, the iPod seems a little unstable at times. For the first little while, I never had any problems with it at all. I think I had to "reboot" the thing only once. However, once I got the Nike+ kit (see parts 6, 7 and 8), I found that I had to "reboot" at least a couple of times a week.
Sometimes the iPod seems a little slow, too, like the CPU has been maxed out or something. I'll turn it on and try to use the click-wheel, but the scrolling is delayed. I'm not sure why this happens, but it's only sometimes.
Hopefully future versions of the firmware will address some of these issues.
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