Electronics : New Apple iPod nano 8GB black

Rating: - An excellent iPod, with a few minor flaws
First of all, its important to note that this is my first iPod, although i've had a play with friend's ones.

Being a student, this was a considered purchase but im extremely pleased with the new iPod - bright, clear screen, excellent sound quality and aesthetically pleasing its a superb little bundle and well worth parting with your hard earned cash to get one.

However, i have noticed a few issues - mainly, the touch wheel is small, and i have large thumbs and so it can sometimes be rather clumsy to get to the song i want to listen too. Secondly, while i can get the earphone in one ear with no problem at all, the left one doesn't seem to fit my ear very well (my friend has had a similar problem) so a lot of the time i don't bother with the surround sound simply becuase of how irritating it is to keep reaching up to your ear on the move (besides, people look at you funny :P)

Apart from these 2 issues, the iPod is still an excellent music player and i would recommend it to anyone.

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Rating: - Nice little piece of kit
I bought this new ipod after having the old 4gb version (plays 1000 tracks) and wanting to upgrade to this version seeing as it holds double that.

Well first off this is ultra thin. I wouldn't say it is breakable (Unless you are just very clumsy) It is a little smaller than a credit card and other than the wider screen is not much different in function than the ipod nano.

While some have complained about the size of the screen (I myself haven't got any films to watch on my ipod and to be honest I bought it for music only) I found the screen due to its increased size easier on the eye and containing some excellent graphics (If you are into that sort of thing) Such as track lists, album covers (Full screen instead of the smaller nano version) rotating pictures and other little nice tricks that if you showed too many people would probably end up with your ipdo being stolen.

The controls are pretty easy to use (I got this rather than the ipod touch due to the fact that it is an all glass screen which would result in a pretty ugly looking ipod after a while full of finger marks and also due to the fact that the controls can be easily used without looking rather than fiddling around with high tech stuff that you really don't need) One thing I have noticed though is that they seem to be a little more sensitive than the nano and if you are looking for a specific track you can end up skipping it and have a frustrating couple of minutes trying to get it to lock on the track you want.

The music quality is excellent and so far so good, I have had no problems at all with mine. I was considering buying a cheaper mp3 player by Panasonic for example but having been happy with the ipod so far I guess stick with what you know. Unless their rivals can come up with something that has equal sound quality, music storage space and troubleshooting then I will stick with the ipod.

Well recommended (Especially if you play it in the car due to the easy to use controls) I would have gone with the 80gb but I had to ask myself do I really need it and as for the touch, I think that's one for the kids.

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Rating: - Buy me something else.....please
I got my i pod as a birthday present and was pretty pleased, i was not a huge fan of the i pod craze and always got another brand. I though i was being converted untill i tunes started to become slow and crashing my computer. Which is new. Also the cover flow decided it would also crash every 3 mins. Battery life was also poor compared with other mp3s. Well after a while i decided to get a replacement. I did get a new....but i recived the i pod nano 4 GB. I sent it back and the replacment they finally gave me had a loose jack connection. Enough was enough and i am waiting to decide on a new Mp3 player that is not an apple. Any suggetions? This is a nice looking piece of kit but i gave up on it due to reliablity problems.

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Rating: - Unreliable piece of junk.
My first nano would only play .WAV files properly. .MP3 had strange 'burbling/bleeping' background noises. .AAC (Apple's default format used by the iTunes store) wouldn't play at all.

The replacement seemed ok for a short time, but after about a week the 'clicker' and alarm beep have stopped working. This one is going to be going back too. If I'd not already bought iPod specific accessories elsewhere I'd be after a refund not replacement this time.

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Rating: - Almost worth 5 stars
First I will admit that I have never been a fan of Apple as a company. They have always over priced their computers, and insisted on non standard hardware to lock users into their gravy train. It was therefore not surprising that I did not rush out a buy an iPod when they were released a few years ago. I used cheap USB based flash players. However as my music collection grew I found these players to be less useful as they really do not allow you to organise your music collection.

Having considered various more expensive MP3 players, I opted to buy an Apple iPod Nano with 8GB of storage. I had also considered the 80GB Classic, but decided against this because it is based on a hard drive which is slower and more fragile than flash memory.

Now for the actual review. The player is small with a small but very clear screen. The built in software is very easy to navigate, but I do find the touch sensitive 'wheel' control does not always work as well as it should, often refusing to settle on the option you want. This is not a major hassle as you get there in the end (ie if it is jumping down one item, I select the one above that which I actually want). One last point the feature which is supposed to equalise the volume of tracks so that you do not have to constantly adjust the volume on the iPod does not seem to work well. Also unlike just about every other player the iPod can not play WMA format files (which my collection was in due to them taking up half the space as an equivalent MP3 file).
The ear phones could be better, even if they had supplied them with a sports style ear hook to stop them constantly falling out (I replaced them with a set of Phillips Sport phones).
The battery takes about two hours to charge and does last a long time (but not as long as advertised). However I do worry that this battery is not replaceable, and rechargeable batteries never last long before they start to deteriorate. Especially if you use a dock for instance to listen to music, these also charge the battery, and if used before the battery is fully flat, or after it is fully charged will damage the battery and reduce its life. All in all I prefer devices that take standard batteries which can be easily replaced.
Lastly I should comment on how the player is connected to a computer and on iTunes which you have to use. Unlike other MP3 players the iPod does not use a standard USB cable. Why?, these can do everything the iPod syncing cables does (data exchange and charging). Also the head phone socket is on the bottom beside the cable connector, meaning that the headphones have to be removed to charge, sync or connect the iPod to a dock. Not initially a problem, but I bet that after having to do this you will get wear, and the connection for the headphones will get loose and dodgey. As for iTunes, this works well once you get it going, but takes ages to load, and is also rather slow at ripping CDs compared with the likes of Windows Media Player. It worked fine on my laptop, but when I installed it on my Dell Desktop (with Vista), the changes it made in my Registry caused the DVD/CD writer drive to stop working. When I fixed this iTunes would not work with the drive!
You may think this is a very critical review, but I love using the Nano, and would have loved to give it 5 stars. I have given it 4 stars because of these problems. A great MP3 player, but it could have been so much better if Apple had not gone down its usual line of making things non standard for the sake of it (non standard connector, non compatibility with WMA files etc), and if it was able to be used and synced with more than 1 computer (which unless you resort to clumsy manual file handling it is not).

I am just updating this review as I find myself being increasingly frustrated by the iPods relationship with iTunes. At the time I originally wrote the review I had not bothered to much with some of the flashier features such as coverflow. However I decided it was a pity that about 60% of my music was not being given album artwork automatically. Hours of work later I had manually pasted album covers (copied from Amazon I have to say). However to my dismay certain albums instead of appearing in the coverflow list once appear multiple times. It seems that instead of using the name of the album to link the contents, iTunes uses artist, so if their is an album with more than one artist each one gets listed separately. I worked out I could fix this by manually editing album info for every track by ticking a box saying it was part of a compilation. Very very frustrating. Many hours work to get the machine working as it should. I have to say that the iPod Nano hardware is 5 stars, but iTunes the software is 1 star. Don't even get me started as to why the Nano is more expensive in the UK than in the USA, and yet they can download movies form iTunes and this function is next to useless in the UK as iTunes does not sell movies in the UK, and iTunes will not rip DVDs in the way it will CDs. To get a movie unto my Nano, I had to download a shareware programme to copy my movie DVD (to get red of copy protection) then use a bought software application to transform the copied DVD to iPod compatible mp4, the iTunes to get it unto the iPod. It took about 3 times longer to copy the DVD to the Nano than it then took to watch the movie (surprisingly watchable despite the tiny screen.

Another update. The screen of my Nano have become quite badly scratched. Now as I have not been rubbing it up against any diamonds, I have to conclude that the screen is some sort of plastic rather than glass! I had hoped that Apple would have learned the lesson that if you are charging premium prices you should use premium durable materials for making your products. Obviously not. If Amazon would allow it I would have reduced the rating to 3 stars because of this!