iPod Nano

Author: Quadophile
Published on: 06-01-2007
Views: 59007


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Introduction

A mouse that roars, an iPod what else!

I am one of those proud parents who inherited the iPod from my son. Yes, for a change it was passed-up to me. Not that he is generous, but because of the fact that he along with my daughter were gifted a 4 GB Nano each (silver for my son and pink for my daughter, inscribed with their names at the back in white).

They do look gorgeous to say the least, having a beautiful brushed anodized aluminium casing in comparison to the one I inherited (white plastic) which is the most basic iPod one can get, yes, it is a shuffle with just 512 MB of storage space.  I must admit, it is not as gorgeous as ones they have, but, it is a cute little thing slightly bigger than a Wrigley's 5 stick chewing gum pack, to put it into proper perspective – a mouse that roars!

Today when I look at these iPods I cannot help but remember that it was 22 years ago, in 1984 to be exact, on my visit to Tokyo I had purchased a Sony Walkman in brushed aluminium having a sky blue color. It was the hottest selling Walkman at that time and one of the most expensive at $125 (the only other model which was more expensive was the Walkman Professional, the finest Sony ever came up with). Why $125 you may ask? Well it was the only Walkman to work with a single AA battery and once folded (without the cassette being inside) would be the size of the cassette case itself and no more. It was all aluminium casing and not plastic, it was brimming with features from that era, Dolby B and Dolby C processing and having the capability to play metal oxide cassettes. The earphones provided with the player had diamond coated diaphragms and sounded superb as I remember it. It was by far the smallest Walkman Sony ever produced.

When it comes to portable players Sony's name has been replaced by none other than Apple. They have the top slot as the market leaders for selling portable audio players today. Apple's iTune store is responsible for allowing downloading of a staggering 1.5 billion tunes to its customers.

Apple's newest iPod Nano (2nd Generation) is not a plug and play device out of the box! Yes, that is true, with previous iPods you got a software CD with iTunes and after installing the software you could connect and download the music to the unit. With the new iPod you have to first download the latest iTunes version from Apple's website before you can use it. Do not try to connect the iPod with your existing iTunes software unless you have already upgraded to iTunes version 7 or higher. I certainly sympathize with those still on dial-up as the software is about 35MB and may take a while to download, ouch! According to Steve Jobs of Apple the packaging of the iPod is reduced by 52%, it may be the case but the fact remains that the CD has been omitted to achieve that objective. I cannot criticize this much as this is done supposedly to save the environment by minimizing the litter.

Being a flash memory based player I do not think it would be difficult for a company like Apple to install the software itself into its memory and upon inserting it into the USB port it would either install or update the software on the users computer and give the user the option to either delete the file residing on the unit itself or let it remain for use on another computer if need be. I think that is possible, we just have to wait and see if it is implemented in iPods introduced in future. I wonder why nobody thought of it at Apple.