The iPod nano is now the best iPod, with just a few shortcomings. It is limited to 4GB of storage, does not connect via video to your TV to display photos and it has a smaller screen than the iPod. The advantage over the iPod and the discontinued mini is significant. There is no hard drive mechanism making it amazingly small and robust. It is difficult to overstate how important size is. The storage capacity will be irrelevant to users who don?t have enough songs to fill it.
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The iPod nano is now the best iPod, with just a few shortcomings. It is limited to 4GB of storage, does not connect via video to your TV to display photos and it has a smaller screen than the iPod. The advantage over the iPod and the discontinued mini is significant. There is no hard drive mechanism making it amazingly small and robust. It is difficult to overstate how important size is. The storage capacity will be irrelevant to users who don?t have enough songs to fill it.
Aesthetically it unifies the iPod lineup. It bridges the gap in cost, storage and features between the shuffle and the full size iPod and it pretty much splits the difference in technology between the two, with the screen and click wheel of the full sized player and the solid state memory and a size more in line with the shuffle. It also has no Firewire. It is a shame that the very different aesthetic of the iPod mini is gone. To me, it was the best industrial design of the entire iPod series, but clearly not in harmony with the other iPods the way the nano is. Black is an option, without the red accents of the iPod U2. Look at the cost per GB of storage:
iPod shuffle 512MB – $200 per GB (size: 1 cubic inch and weight: 0.78 oz.)
iPod shuffle 1GB – $150 per GB
iPod nano – 2GB – $100 per GB (size: 1.5 cubic inches and weight: 1.5 oz.)
iPod nano – 4GB- $62.50 per GB
iPod – 20GB – $15 per GB (size: 6.2 cubic inches and weight: 5.9 oz.)
iPod – 60GB – $6.67 per GB (size: 7.4 cubic inches and weight: 6.4 oz.)
Memory drives the cost of these players and the handwriting is on the wall for hard drive based designs. Flash storage will become cheap enough to do away with all the complexity, size and power requirements of drives. People showed that they would pay a premium for a player with a smaller than laptop sized hard drive when Apple first introduced the iPod. They showed that they would pay an even bigger premium for the even smaller drive in the mini. Unlike the shuffle, the nano is a full featured player with an even more expensive memory solution than the mini. The market will embrace the advantages without looking back.