PC Review Reviews Audio iPod Nano

The supplied earbuds are newly designed and have a rubberized surround which helps keep them in place once you insert them into your ears. The design has been improved compared to what was bundled with the previous version of iPod. Apparently Apple spent a good few months in finalizing its design before it was approved for production and inclusion with the new iPod. The 32 Ohm specs of the earbuds make them a fairly easy load on the Nano however it is not the last word in sound quality by any means, an upmarket pair of headphones certainly improves upon the quality of reproduction that Nano is capable of.

The display measures 1.5 inches diagonally with a pixel resolution of 176x132 and having a dot pitch of 0.168. It is bright and crisp as far as readability is concerned (I am 48, use reading glasses but I could do without them). I took the iPod outdoors to check how readable the screen is in direct sunlight. I had no issues whatsoever, unlike some of the cell phones that I used in the past were a pain when it came to visibility in direct sunlight, a situation which has improved with most of the portable products with tiny screens these days.

Improvements on the 2nd Generation iPod Nano

• Anodized aluminium casing with colour choices
• Improved battery life (double capacity as per Apple's claims)
• Brand new UI (user interface) with intuitive controls
• Brighter screen (40% brighter compared to older model)
• Slide show option while viewing photos with various timer settings you can choose

Features

• Quickscroll feature to search songs, if you move your thumb faster on the wheel it changes to alphabetical index instead of song by song search to make things faster.
• Clock with multiple time zones and a stop watch. Can come in handy when you are travelling across the oceans or want to just keep track of two time zones.
• User configurable maximum volume limit, really a great feature which helps the user in prevention of hearing damage (I urge every user to set it sensibly to prevent hearing loss)
• Being a music player I just could not figure out why there would be a need for “Contacts” don't we all use a cell phone for that AND back it up on our computers?
• Syncing of album art associated with the songs downloaded from iTunes. This will surely take up expensive space on your iPod Nano restricting the user to less number of songs, more so if you have the 2 GB version and does nothing to the enjoyment of music listening.