Apple 3rd Gen iPod Nano in Action and Review

I think you will agree with me after watching my “in Action” videos below that the 3rd Gen Nano is the best ultra-portable entertainment device on the market now. It gives you hours of entertainment in the form of music, videos, photos and games in an unbelievably small package. Not only do the functions perform smoothly and flawlessly, their implementations are elegant and intuitive. But before getting on with the “in Action” videos, let’s see how the music video of Feist’s 1234 looks on my Nano:

Music
Music is at the heart of every iPod. But with only 8GB of storage, I have decided even before I ordered my Nano that this Nano won’t be my main music playing device. In my latest sync, I have selected only 48 songs from 25 albums to sync with my Nano.

Even with so few songs, I still get to appreciate the usefulness and beauty of Cover Flow. Cover Flow actually makes more sense to me on an iPod than on a Mac computer because it really makes navigation easier and more intuitive on a device that has limited input capabilities. If your albums come with album art, you will really love the new Nano because it makes full use of album art. Besides Cover Flow, a thumbnail picture is placed next to each album title under the “Albums” menu to make navigation, again, more intuitive. Because, chances are one can recognize an album more quickly by its picture rather than by its title. An album art is also displayed in each lyrics page as well. Speaking of the lyrics page, text is much more legible than on the 2nd Gen Nano.

Videos
Video quality of the Nano is much better than I had expected. I don’t have my 5th Gen iPod with me to compare now because it is on loan to a friend. But even at just 50% of the brightness, the videos appear very bright and viewable. For the purpose of demonstration, I have synced an episode each from my iTunes library’s TV Shows to my Nano. iTunes isn’t flexible in allowing its users to choose which episodes of a TV Show to sync with an iPod. It only allows synchronization in accordance with its predefined rules, like the “last 3 most recent unwatched” episodes of a TV show. And once you have selected the synchronization scheme, it will be applied to all the TV Shows that you choose to sync to your Nano. I hope in future upgrades, I can select the particular episodes that I want to sync.

Photos
Because the 3rd Gen Nano has almost twice the screen resolution over the last generation, photos on Nano finally look good. I’ve synchronized over 1,000 photos to my Nano in my latest sync. Besides resolution, there is another noted improvement in the Photos application over previous generations. If an album title is longer than the width of the iPod, it now scrolls automatically so the title doesn’t get truncated. The title appears on top of the thumbnails page also scrolls to make room for long titles.

For some strange reasons, my Nano thinks every photos I took were taken on 6th February, 2040. I don’t know whether it is a bug or not. My photos are synchronized with my Aperture library and their dates are reported correctly in Aperture.

Games
The new Nano came with 3 games pre-loaded, one fewer than my 2nd Gen Nano. I played the iPod Quiz and Vortex in the video below. Gaming experience has improved a lot over previous generations because of the higher resolution of the screen. The background soundtracks of the two games I played are also very good which make the whole gaming experience even richer. I think I will be very likely to get more games from iTunes in the next couple of days.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 1st, 2007 at 02:13 and is filed under Apple, Mac, Review, iPod Nano and tagged with Apple, iPod, MP3, Nano, Red Product, Review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.