My sacrifice!

One of these days, that I wasn’t paying attention cause of the exams, Apple released one new product and a new version of another one.

iPod nano
… is the successor of the iPod mini and a hybrid between the later and iPod shuffle. Nano is much slimmer than Mini, actually its thickness is about the same as Shuffles’. It seams it’s a little longer and a little narrower than Mini, so you can really call it “pocket MP3 player.”

The next most noticeable addition is color screen. It’s a little smaller than the regular iPods but still a nice feature. Actually, I’m not very fond of color screens on everyday gadgets because most of the time you don’t really need colors. Besides that, color screen usually need backlight, that black&white ones don’t, and as a consequence the screen is harder to read on a really sunny day. But because of the “photo feature” of Nano, this might be forgive-able.

The real “inovation” or “change” lies on the inside. iPod nano has flash drive (flash memory) instead of a regular Microdrive. The advantages are obvious:

• Harder to brake - If it doesn’t have any moving parts, you can’t break them (flash memory is less error prone)
• Faster - Without the limitations of the regular hard drive (linear access is fast, random access slower), the data can be accessed and written faster, much like RAM
• Lighter - chips are much lighter in weight than glass, metal or any other kind of plate with an electric motor attached. Nano weights only 42 grams because of this!

Until now I was convinced that flash memory is very expensive (just look at the price of memory cards and mp3 players) but Apple used it anyway, so it must be getting cheaper.

All in all, I think Nano is another good product in the iPod family and it just might be my first iPod. :)

iTunes 5
With the new iPod Apple released a new version of iTunes. The new major version introduces directories for playlist organisation, a little changed look, some new kind of search, another new kind of shuffle-ing and a few more things (including a free copy of Harry Potter audiobooks :).

I’ll take a look at these new features in next few days and report how are they working out.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 7th, 2005 at 23:53 and is filed under MacOS X, Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.