Apple iPod Nano: A Treat for The Eyes & The Ears

Apple unveiled a new ’pencil thin’ iPod model earlier this week which is surely making heads turn. Why? Because it’s outright sexy. The iPod nano, launched at a much hyped press event in San Francisco drew many "oohs" and "aahs" from those present.

With statistics like 3.5"-1.6"-0.27", the nano is thinner than a pencil and weighs less than eight quarters. The new iPod is set to replace the iPod mini which was Apple’s best selling version of the iPod. Moreover, the nano comes with a colour screen so you can show the album cover while you listen to the music and you can store your photographs and watch a slideshow anytime you want. The iPod nano also debuts in two colour variants - the usual iPod white and a shining cool black one.

The business card sized player uses flash memory to store songs rather than the small spinning hard drives used in the mini and the basic iPod. So with the lack of moving parts, the nano is going to be absolutely skip free, less fragile and not prone to hard drive crashes. Also the battery life is claimed to be 14 hours, which is even more than the traditional iPod.

Sound Quality is the same as on the other iPods - Revolutionary and awe-inspiring. Control is through the Apple proprietary Click Wheel. And there is already a heap of nano accessories with more to flood in - Athletic armbands, docks, lanyards, and colourful skins. Like the other iPods, nano syncs seamlessly with iTunes, be it on a Mac or on a Windows 2000/XP platform.

But the only point where critics are pinning it down is the cost per gigabyte factor. The nano has been introduced in two capacities - 2Gb (500 songs) and 4Gb (1000 songs) which are priced at $ 199 and $ 249 respectively whereas it’s predecessor, the mini, also retailed in two storage capacity variants - 4Gb and 6Gb which cost $ 199 and $ 249. So the cost per gigabyte has gone up actually. But, the major factor responsible for this price increase has been the use of flash memory based storage solutions instead of the mini hard disk used on earlier. So Apple has increased it’s own component costs in the development of the nano which accounts for the price rise.

Apple has about 75 percent of the market for digital music players to itself, with iPod sales accounting for about one-third of its total revenue. Now with no iPod mini to lessen its impact, the new nano is surely poised to become the firm’s next bestseller. A product, so smartly conceived and well engineered is surely going to sell like hot bread on a Sunday morning. Indeed, Apple may well have the market for this newly defined form factor to itself for a while. For one thing, its industrial designers had to do some stellar work to figure out how to pack a full-featured iPod into an enclosure that’s thinner than a pencil and weighs less than eight quarters.

Moreover Nano will clearly create problems for competitors, many of which are already reeling. The competition is having a tough time, and the iPod nano won’t help them. Rio, which once led the MP3 player market, has given up. Creative is still in there, but does not have the cachet of iPod. Steve Jobs’ prediction that the nano will become the world’s best-selling MP3 player is hardly going out on a limb.

The thing reeks of cool. It is tiny, it is elegant. It is as desirable a device as I have seen in the past two years. What more does anyone want…!!