Apple iPod Nano was introduced on September 7, 2005, replacing the iPod mini, which was discontinued on the same day. It is considered as a hybrid of iPod Shuffle and iPod Mini. By looks, it was one of the classiest players with no competitor near-by. It was one of the fastest selling iPod claiming record sales of 1 million in just 17 days. However, the iPod Nano was so scratch prone, that even a micro fiber cloth could cause damage to it. In some cases, the screen was known to crack under pressure. Apple did confirm that a small percent of iPod Nanos did ship with a faulty screen and agreed to replace any Nanos with cracked screens, but denied that the iPod Nano was more susceptible to scratching than prior iPods.


On September 12, 2006, Apple updated the Nano line. The new second-generation or "2G" Nano features a scratch-resistant, brushed aluminum casing staying true to the earlier iPod Mini's styling. The color options, featuring five colors (silver, blue, green, pink, and black), mirror that of the mini as well. The second-generation Nano features "a brighter, more vibrant display", a battery life upgrade from 14 to 24 hours, and doubled capacity. They are available in capacities of 2, 4 and 8 GB. The new iPod Nanos also support gapless playback of audio files, a new search option, and a 40% brighter screen. As of today, the one gigabyte model has been discontinued and been replaced with the second-generation iPod Shuffle.

The 2 GB model is available only in silver, the 4 GB is available in silver, blue, green, pink and the limited edition red, and the black color is exclusive only to the 8 GB model.

With a dimension of just 3.5 x 1.6 x 0.26 inches and weighing just 40 grams, it is one of the lightest and sleekest players in its class. In fact, it even rivals out some of the thumb stick based MP3 players. The iPod Nano uses flash memory instead of a hard disk. As a result, it has no significant moving parts (excluding the click wheel), making it immune to skipping and far more durable than disk-based players. The iPod Nano has a screen size of 1.5 inches (38 mm) diagonal, supports a resolution of 176 x 132 pixels, and can display 65,536 colors (16-bit color). It has a touch sensitive wheel, which is known as click wheel. The click wheel is used for navigation, increase/decrease volume, time skip and for playing games. It has four buttons integrated in the click wheel in the four directions. The Click Wheel is certainly one of the best innovative feature of the iPod lines and makes it stand apart from the crowd. This wheel works even if there is a small layer of cloth or rubber on it. This way I can still control my iPod Nano, even though it is in my jean's pocket. Can any other player do that?

Like the previous Nano, it has the dock connection and the stereo audio output plug at the bottom of the player and Hold slider is on the top. It charges through either the USB connector or a separately purchased charger. It takes 1.5 hours to charge 80% of the player's capacity and 3 hours to charge the built-in lithium ion battery. It sports a new earphone design and even the quality of the earphone has changed. More on that later.

iTunes software is needed for transferring song from the PC to the iPod Nano. However, there has been no CD bundled along, nor did they give a soft copy on the player itself. The moment one connects the player to the PC through USB interface, it requests the user to download iTunes, which is around 18 MB.

Features

The new iPod Nano supports skip less playback. It can play AAC (16 to 320 Kbps), Protected AAC (from iTunes Store), MP3 (16 to 320 Kbps), MP3 VBR, Audible (formats 2, 3, and 4), Apple Lossless, AIFF, and WAV. It does lack support for many popular format such as WMA, OGG and RMA. It supports a total of 30 languages.

Besides audio, it also supports pictures in JPEG, BMP, GIF, TIFF and PNG formats. It also supports the popular PSD format, but that's restricted only to Mac users. It supports slideshow of the pictures, whose settings are totally customizable. Unfortunately there's no option of TV-out, which could be used in displaying the pictures on a large screen.

Besides that, it also supports podcast, audio books and e-books in iPod Notes format. Besides that it supports Clock with Alarm, Games such as Solitaire and Brick, Contacts, Calendar, Notes, Stopwatch, Screen lock, Volume Limit, Equalizer and Search Facility. From all of that, I found the search facility the best. This feature is present only in the 2nd gen Ipod Nano and 5.5G iPod Video. You can literally search by selecting the letters one by one to form a word. The search is real-time, so you get instant result. It allows searching of albums, song name, artist, audio books, notes, etc. There is still no support for FM Radio. Another cool feature is the fast scroll. If you are going through a long list of songs, you can just scroll faster to see alphabet scrolling. This feature is best experienced rather than explained.