iPod Nano - Small and beautiful

Apple has did it again. iPod Nano - their brand new version of this ultra-cool and hip MP3 player is breath-taking! And they don't call it 'Nano' for no reason. Take a look and you will know what I mean.

At an amazingly impossible dimension of 9 x 4 x 0.69 cm and weighing just 42g, the iPod nano comes in 2 GB and 4 GB models. That comes to around 500/1000 songs, with a batter recharge that will last about 14 hours of music playback, as Apple claims.

The most interesting fact about the iPod nano is that it is meant to replace the iPod Mini. Go to the Apple site and you won't find a single trace of the Mini anywhere, it has simply vanished into thin air. Or rather, has been eaten up by the Nano. It gets even more interesting when you consider the fact that the Mini is one of the most successful music players around. Apple has really taken a bold step to replace the Min with the Nano. How it will fare with the market is something that remains to be seen.

At the heart of the matter, the Nano is more expensive than the Mini when you consider the price per Gigabyte of storage. A 6 GB Mini would have cost you about $250 whereas the 4 GB Nano costs about the same. It is possibly because of the change in technology. The Mini used a hard-drive for storage, whereas the Nano uses flash memory. That would probably also explain the razor like thickness (or rather, thinness) that it has managed to achieve.

However, the Nano does look a bit flimsy in the photographs ( I haven't seen a real one yet!) and it is hard to tell how easy would the ClickWheel to use. I hope that Apple's obsession for attaining nano dimensions for the prodcut hasn't forced it to make a ClickWheel too big for the user's thumb.

Apple has indeed taken a bold move in taking the Mini off its shelves and putting the Nano in its place and the fact that the Mini accounts for more than half of all iPods sold. Wit the Nano, Apple has stuck to its tradition of pushing technology and customer imagination to the limits. We just hope thinking differently hasn't been a just too different this time! All the best, Apple!