Apple iPod nano 2G 8GB MP3 Player Review

Full Metal Housing
Perhaps the most prominent feature of the second generation iPod nano 8GB MP3 player is its brushed aluminum casing, a throwback to the iPod minis that were prematurely silenced with the debut of the original iPod nano. Sporting rounded edges, the anodized aluminum casing marks the return of colors to fit your personality (and the death of white).

4GB seems to be the sweet spot, with four colors to choose from: silver, green, blue, and pink. The center button on these units has been colored to match the rest of the iPod, while the clickwheel remains a streaking white. The 2GB iPod only comes in silver, while like the Macbook, jet black remains reserved for the premium 8GB MP3 player buyers - the only 2G nano to feature a colored clickwheel and for the first time, black tops and bottoms. Unfortunately, the earbuds shipped with the black 8GB are still white, ruining the blacker-than-the-blackest-black-times-infinity effect.

Apple brought us back the aluminium casing.
2G nano on the right, FYI.

The whole thing is now in black.

Pretty thin if you ask me.

Five colors to choose from now; 8GB's only available in black though and 2GB in silver.

Also, to squelch the complaints from first generation users, the aluminum casing is much better protected against scratches than the Lexan plastic of old. The LCD screen, obviously using a different covering as well is also scratch resistant, being able to withstand the abuse of my fingernail, blue jeans rubbing against it, and the not so everyday placement in the same pocket as your house keys while doing light jumping jacks test. As such, the protective sleeve shipped with 1G nanos after complaints arose is no longer included.

Improved Navigation
In my past review of the iPod nano 4GB, I praised it for its fluid navigation that just works. Scrolling by moving your thumb in a circular motion just seems natural and can help for precisely selecting that one track in a sea of songs. By placing the buttons underneath the click wheel, not a single control save for the hold switch lies out of reach, it's all right at the thumb. Moving in and out of menus is simple, just scroll to a desired item and press the center button to activate that item or move into it if there's an arrow next to it, and press menu to return to the parent menu. With seemingly perfect navigation, it's hard to believe that Apple could provide any serious enhancements to the interface, yet somehow they did.

Scrolling has been significantly improved, as a white on black overlay will appear in the center screen after about two seconds of fast scrolling with the current letter of the alphabet displayed in the center, which then proceeds to scroll by first letter even at slow speeds until your thumb is lifted off of the scroll wheel.

In addition to this, songs can now be quickly located using the new Search menu that acts just like the search bar within iTunes, able to search through song titles, artists, and albums all at once and then display the search results with corresponding icons indicating if a result is a group or album. The search is able to look at the entire tags rather than strictly from the beginning, so that searching for "ste" would turn up Steve Vai as well as Rammstein and One Step Closer.

Audio Assault
Sounds produced from the 2G iPod nano 8GB are practically the same as those from the original iPod nano; although I could tell that the treble has been slightly improved as have the midtones. Overall, the audio quality is nothing short of excellent, with little distortion as the volume is turned up, and nice, deep bass that doesn't overpower the overall tone of the music - all without the use of battery-eating equalizers.

While there is still no visual custom EQ for you to tweak on the go, Apple has included a hearty 22 EQ settings to choose from, including Acoustic, Bass Booster, Bass Reducer, Classical, Dance, Deep, Electronic, Flat, Hip Hop, Jazz, Latin, Loudness, Lounge, Piano, Pop, R&B, Rock, Small Speakers, Spoken Word, Treble Booster, Treble Reducer, and Vocal Booster. That should keep you occupied for some time.

The iPod nano's support for ID3 tags remains mostly unchanged, providing support for song-specific EQ settings, album art that's displayed to the left of the currently playing track or can be zoomed into, and the ability to sort tunes by playlists, artist, albums, song titles and genres. When you're on the road and need to make a quick playlist but don't have a computer, fear not, as on-the-go playlists can be created simply by holding down the center button on a song title. These on-the-go playlists may be saved for later use within the playlist menu. Gapless playback of songs is finally a reality thanks to the iPod nano 2G and iTunes 7 for tracks that go right into the next one, a must-have when listening to multi-part compositions of classical music and certain albums such as those from Linkin Park where songs cross over into the next track.

The supplied earbuds, despite their white handicap performed admirably well, delivering crisper sound than the older ones that were included with the iPod nano, and are considerably lighter too. However, in a surprising move by Apple they lack the foam covers that can either make your ear itch or help to keep the earbuds in place.

Battery life on the new nano has been significantly improved, taking just under 27 hours to die when playing back MP3s with mixed bitrates at 60% volume with minimal backlighting, and a few short games of solitaire. Considering that Apple only rated the battery life at 24 hours, needless to say I am quite pleased with this.

Vibrant Visuals
Pictures and text displayed on the second generation iPod nano are incredibly crisp, offering a higher resolution in a small 1.5" LCD than most MP3 players, although don't expect them to best the clarity of the first generation nano, as they use the same 176x132 screen with a .168mm dot pitch. However, the 2nd gen iPod nano uses a new backlight that's 40% brighter. When combined with the film covering of the LCD instead of the Lexan on the original, pictures appear more astounding than ever, with better color quality and brightness that can take on outdoor lighting with ease.

The Photo Album feature remains unchanged, able to synchronize an entire folder or the specific subfolders, copying over as many pictures as possible after music has first been synchronized. Optionally, users may include full-resolution images instead of just the iPod-sized thumbnails when synchronizing for access on a PC via the iPod's USB Mass Storage support.

Once the photos have been transferred to the iPod nano, simply pick the folder of photos you wish to view and a small 4x3 matrix will appear, with the month and year of the selected photo's creation date displayed up top. Scrolling through hordes of photos is really quick with thumbnails appearing rather quickly, although users with several photos will encounter a 1-2 second delay before the matrix generates previews. Clicking on a photo will open it in full screen, able to be scrolled through with the wheel. A second click will start the slideshow, complete with adjustable timings, transitions and background music. Unfortunately, the iPod nano still has yet to receive TV-Out, so good luck showing off your pictures to large groups of people.

Extra!
Unfortunately, new out-of-the-box extras are practically non-existent; however all the nifty features from the previous generation are still a thumb's click away. There's a world clock with support for over 20 concurrent cities at the same time, each with its own alarm clock and snooze settings, and quick night/day visualization by switching the face of the clock to black or white.

Great for sporting events and timing speeches, Apple included a stopwatch that automatically saves the statistics and lap times to the nearest second for later review. The rarely-used screen lock is back, and is still as cumbersome and annoying to use, providing temporary protection from those looking to sneak a peak at your contact list. That is of course, assuming you have the will to navigate the menus to lock the iPod and then scroll through a 4-digit combination every time you want to use it again. Didn't think so.

Games, perhaps my favorite time killers when my Nintendo DS isn't on me are still pre-loaded on the iPod nano 2G, and yet again, nothing new to see here. The standard Brick (Steve Wozniak's Breakout), Solitaire, Parachute and Music Quiz are still holding strong. What surprises me however, is the continued lack of downloadable games for the iPod nano unless you're brave enough to run iPod Linux. Even now that games may be purchased online from the iTunes Music Store for 5G iPods, there are still no new games for the nanos. Here's hoping that changes in the future.

Contacts and calendars for those with busy lives are still here, able to pull names from the Address Book and iCal on Mac OS X, and from the Microsoft Address Book and Microsoft Outlook in Windows. For those that use other programs, you may drag standard *.ics calendars and *.vcf vCard contacts to their respective folders on the iPod without hassle. Quick notes, to do lists and grocery lists may also be placed on the iPod by dragging *.txt files to the Notes folder.

The only real new extra feature for the iPod nano 2G is the capability to do voice recording, assuming you have the dosh to shell out for the $60 MicroMemo from XtremeMac or the $70 Belkin TuneTalk.

USB 2.0 Mass Storage
Need to transfer a file from the computer at the office to home so you can work on it over the weekend, or don't like carrying multiple flash drives around? No problem, because when the iPod's plugged into the computer, it shows up as a plain old disk drive for quick file transfers. After a long string of reviews for competing PlaysForSure MP3 players that force the user to partition the drive or worse yet, not transfer anything at all unless Windows Media Player is installed, I'm relieved to be able to review a MP3 player that works as an industry standard USB Mass Storage Device, the way it was meant to be so I may transfer as many or as few files as I want to on the operating systems of my choice.

Unfortunately, for some Apple really dropped the ball when it came to flash performance on the second generation iPod nano. While still able to compete with the other flash-based MP3 players on the market such as the Samsung YP-Z5, compared to its older sibling the speed has literally been cut in half. As you can see in the below Sandra tests the new nano was only able to attain read and write speeds of 25Mbps and 34Mbps respectively, whereas the previous generation was able to do 34Mbps and 68Mbps during the 64MB file test. Speeds for the 2MB test were just as disappointing, earning only 23Mbps and 30Mbps, while the first generation scored as high as 37Mbps and 67Mbps easily.

Now, because we can't simply go off of synthetic benchmarks, a more real world test of transferring a large 3.4GB ISO file took 15m:33s to transfer to the new iPod nano. The older nano could transfer the same file in 6m:31s. Not terrible, but not great either. Surprisingly, when transferring music, it took 37m:31s to completely fill the 2nd generation iPod with a mixed batch of 1,585 songs encoded at various bitrates in AAC and MP3, totaling 4d:19h:13m, or approximately 7.36GB (about 27Mbps). This is extremely close to the 28Mbps speeds achieved by the original, so depending on the task at hand the 2nd generation iPod nano may not be that much slower at all.

Other Thoughts
While it doesn't stick out like a sore thumb, owners of the new iPod nano will be slightly thrown off when unpacking the new iPod nano from it's minimalist see-through packaging by the notable omission of any installation disc for installing iTunes, Apple deciding to rely on customers downloading the latest version straight from Apple's website. While this saves on packaging, it may prove to be annoying for those unfortunate enough to still be stuck on dialup.

Another curious move by Apple was the lack of video support for the new nano, something that the previous generation could do with iPod Linux. Perhaps Steve just doesn't like watching videos on a tiny screen or possibly because maintaining two versions of every TV show on the iTunes Music Store creates excessive overhead, but when you're bored on the bus, videos can be a godsend. After all, every other manufacturer is doing it.

Finally, those who are considering upgrading from the old iPod nano should be warned that any accessories they purchased for the nano may not work with the new one due to different spacing between ports on the bottom, and new buyers should be equally aware of this fact until new iPod accessories are specifically labeled for the 2nd generation nano.

Recap
Overall the second generation iPod nano is quite an improvement over the first. Even tighter audio with gapless playback, a brighter screen and scratch resistant casing, coupled with a 27 hour battery life and improved navigation make for quite an upgrade. However, at the same time the crippled speed compared to the first generation iPod nano, lack of downloadable games, and overall lack of new exciting features makes this one a yawner. While still highly recommended for the price point even moreso than the original, it's in this reviewer's opinion that Apple has held back on what could have been an even better upgrade.