3rd gen iPod nano
i do understand that apple sucks (mouse-bound state grubbers). i know iPods are supposedly horrendously dickish. and while most crowds are oohing over the iPod Touch (sold out almost everywhere, apparently), at the store yesterday it was the new nano that blew me away. damn, but this is a piece of work.
too bad apple fucks away their pictures with some retarded mushy-soft airbrush gimmick; they don’t compare to seeing this beauty in person. if you haven’t seen it, give it a whirl at a store that lets you mess with the MP3 players (e.g., best buy). the screen is bright and clear. i’ve heard people bitching about “who would want to watch a TV show on this puny thing?”, but it looks great to me. bought it. even the packaging’s museum material.
though the primary use in mind was boxing training (don’t like to bounce my 30GB hard drive iPod, and it’s heavy anyway), i can see this will become my primary player (i own 3 now; the third’s a 1GB flash non-apple i try to keep charged and capacious for recording cop encounters). bitch all you want about iTunes and whatever, the “smart playlist” shit made it pure pleasure to set up a second iPod on my computer, customizing what mix of podcasts/music/video fill up the ample (for a secondary gizmo) 4GB. all i do is delete all the items in the music playlist, and it’s instantly refreshed with a new mix of stuff i haven’t played in the last month.
others have complained about the new shape of the nano. i think it’s perfect. fits in my back pocket with little danger of snapping in two if i sit on it. almost can’t believe this little (thin!) gizmo does what it does. plenty of power, and the battery charge lasts longer than i’d have thought possible (shorter than apple claims or not). i look at it and think back to when i bought the first walkman in high school for nearly 200 1980 dollars (~500 2007 dollars). yikes. these new gadgets are cool. i have a couple of nits to pick with the nano (mostly podcast related), but nothing that eclipses its beauty.