Then there’s the FM radio. Apple may be late to the radio-on-an-MP3-player game, but it’s done it right: The Nano is, in certain respects, the best FM radio I’ve ever used. It’s not that it sounds good (although it does, for a pocketable radio–it uses the earbud cord as an antenna). It’s that it uses its memory as a buffer to provide TiVo-like features. You can pause a station at any time, and the Nano will record up to fifteen minutes’ worth of airtime, letting you pause, rewind, and fast-forward. The interface is a little quirky (I had trouble remembering which clickwheel action did what in radio mode) but it makes over-the-air radio act a lot more like digital music.

Unlike most of the FM radios I own, the Nano uses RDS to display the station’s call letters (and sometimes what’s playing) on its display. It also supports a tagging feature that lets it identify songs so you can purchase them from iTunes; David Pogue says that only Clear Channel supports this feature so far, and I didn’t come across any taggable songs as I browsed my way through the FM band looking for music I liked. But if it catches on, it’ll be another point in the Nano’s favor.

The fourth-generation iPod Nano had a spoken menu feature that was aimed mostly at users with impaired vision. The new Nano retains this feature and adds VoiceOver menus, as first seen in the buttonless, displayless iPod Shuffle. Enable this feature (which you do in iTunes, not on the Nano itself) and briefly tapping the clickwheel’s center button causes the player to speak the artist and song title in a surprisingly pleasant, comprehensible robotic voice. Very handy if you have the Nano tucked away in a pocket or somewhere else where its display is out of sight.

One other new feature is only semi-new: Until now, the Nano could serve as a voice recorder if you plugged in an external microphone. With the advent of the 5G Nano’s built-in microphone, it can now record up to two hours of audio at a time, no accessories required.

As a music and video player, the Nano hasn’t changed much–which is fine, since it was already about as refined as a device this tiny can be. You still get access to all the goodness of the iTunes ecosystem, now with Genius Mixes (autoprogrammed selections from your music, similar to the existing Genius playlist feature). And the slightly larger screen makes the new Nano a slightly more pleasing video playback device.

In short, the new Nano provides everything that was nice about its predecessor plus quite a bit more, for either the same price (for the $149 8GB version) or less (the $179 16GB model replaces the $199 16GB 4G player). The Nano was always the slickest, most elegant undersized media player; now it’s one of the most feature-rich, too.

Which leaves me fascinated by one question: How does it compare to the iPod Touch? The Touch, which starts at only $20 more than the $179 Nano (albeit for a unit with half the memory) has a far roomier screen and access to tens of thousands of applications; at first blush, you might think that the only rational reason to buy a Nano instead is if the Touch is just too chunky for your tastes.

But with the new Nano getting all these new features and the Touch remaining almost unchanged (except for a faster processor and 64GB of memory in the top-of-the-line version) these two iPods have diverged into surprisingly distinct devices. And the Nano has more going for it than just lack of bulk–it’s a video camera, it’s an FM radio, it’s a pedometer, and it can record voice memos without an external microphone. (Apple rates its battery life as somewhat less generous than that of the Touch–24 hours of audio and five of video vs. 30 hours of audio and six of video for the Touch.)

You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to develop a hunch that Apple will eventually release an iPod Touch with most or all of the Nano’s new features–or to think that “eventually” may come real soon now. For now, though, the choice between the Nano and Touch will be, for some people, a tough one. That’s a tribute to just how thoroughly Apple has reinvigorated the Nano.

«PREVIOUS PAGE 1 2 

14 Comments


Read more: Apple, Apple. iPod, Digital Music, MP3 Players