My 2nd Generation ipod last 24 hours with full brightness and a 10 second backlight! I’ve had it for nearly 4 years, too!

The “aluminum” casing looks like cheap plastic, and feels like it too. When I got the 4th gen ipod in purple, it was gorgeous. This one was so hideous and flat colored and textureless that I couldn’t even buy the blue or purple, I had to go with pink. The pink, red, green, and “gold” (more yellow) ones are the only decent looking ones. The other ones look very cheap.

But, the radio feature, while not having the best sound, is FANTASTIC! The tagging of your favorite songs is even better.

In the end, I had to return it (just like the 4th gen). I listen to my ipod too much in a day to have it drain in a few hours. And what is the point of a gorgeous show if you can’t see it because the backlight is off and the brightness is so low?

It might have visual appeal, but it’s not worth it if you have an original or 2nd gen or even a 3rd or 4th gen, because they all look and perform better.

I, unfortunately, will never be buying an Apple ipod again =(

Despite my reservations, watching the Apple keynote of this new product has led me to head down to the Apple store and pick up a 16 GB 5th Generation iPod Nano, to add to my “collection.”

First reactions? This Nano appears just as sleek and gorgeous as the commendable 4th generation Nano. In fact, at first glance, you would not reckon must different about the newer version. I quickly tried out the recording of video. This was average. It is nice, if you carry your Nano everywhere, to have the ability to take video. Cool. When played back on the Nano, the video looks pretty excellent. It’s average, when played back on your computer. Again, far from terrible, but in the age where digital cameras have some fantastic movie modes, you have to simply call the iPod Nano video average, but most of all convenient. Fun too.

Personally, I have found myself most interested in the new Pedometer built into the Nano. It can keep track of your steps during the day, if you keep the device on you all day. I reckon this could push me to be more active. Again, is this feature really necessary in an iPod? I’m not sure, but keep in mind that this product is well loved among fitness gurus for its portability, nearly feather-like weight, and solid state memory.

Finally, in a pinch, to listen to a sporting event or particular talk radio show, the new nano includes a FM Turner. Blah you might say? Yes, that is not particularly exciting, BUT the Nano adds one cool feature to FM Radio. You can “pause,” the radio up to 15 minutes, such as you might do with the DVR connected to your television. It works flawlessly. Before one questions, no, you cannot schedule radio recordings. Still, the new nano will make FM radio a bit more modern, with this pause function.

Overall, it does seem as though Apple is not quite sure how to keep adding features that are truly remarkable to the iPod Nano. The Nano is the best selling MP3 player in the history of the planet, more sold than any other iPod to date. But, the Nano’s best features continue to be its size, ability to sync fantastic content from your iTunes library, portability, and fantastic user interface. The click wheel continues to make finding your music and videos relatively simple. Again, the Nano is superb, but the new features are probably a bit specific on if they will be useful to you or not.

The updated nano is that bit more advanced with a few new features, particularly for many the ability to record a quick video, easily, will be attractive. But, if you have the last generation Nano, I would not worry about upgrading too soon, unless having the absolute latest device and new “features,” are vital to you. Fantastic device, but not much different than before.

Having said all of that, I am really impressed with this new 5th generation iPod Nano. I find that the FM radio has fantastic reception and is simple to use, unlike the Apple dongle radio attachment I use on my previous generation Nano. The radio software integration is nicely done and very simple to use, set favorite stations and pause as necessary to talk on the phone and then quickly resume where the music or talk show left off for up to 15 minutes.

The playback of pre-recorded movie video is clear and the sound is very excellent as with earlier iPods. The video recording is point and shoot simple to use but not of very high quality – about what you would expect from a cell phone- but I really don’t plot on using this as a video camera. Would have been nice if Apple had included a still camera as well but I suspect the quality would not be acceptable without adding more componentry requiring more space and cost. I did note that this iPod has a speaker built in (which I assume is the microphone as well) but its sound quality is not excellent.

The pedometer function (Fitness) is fascinating and can be used without any external attachments. It only counts steps and not distance so I assume that I will need to multiply the counted steps by stride length to come up with distance walked. Ironically, it does have you place in your weight but I’m not certain how this is used.

The build quality is superb, the unit is very compact and light weight with Apple’s customary intuitive user interfaces that make it simple to use right out of the box without reading the instructions (which I dread resorting to anyway). In summary, I am very pleased with my new iPod and am rapidly working on irrefutable justifications for its buy before the credit card statement arrives and my wife questions, “Did you buy ANOTHER iPod?”.

One thing you’ll notice in the footage, where I shot the same things back to back with both camcorders, is that where the Flip really shines is in low light. I shot the hamster moments at night, in a room illuminated only by a lamp. Not only did the iPod nano take grainy video, it also didn’t do any kind of white balancing and the indoor lightbulb added an orange tint to the clip; I’m not sure exactly how the Flip is designed to address this (whether it automatically adjusts white balance or just has a better average setting), but the footage shows that it captured light correctly both outdoors and indoors. If you compare the hamster shots with the Flip and with the nano, I reckon it’s clear that for indoor and lowlight there’s no comparison and the Flip has the nano beat hands down. The outdoor images are closer, but I reckon even this small video shows greater detail in the Flip video. When you blow the images up larger there’s no comparison — the Flip looks decent even on a huge screen TV, the iPod nano footage looks like it was shot with, well, a toy camera. In all fairness, that’s all it is at this point. (Note, by the way, that, like the Flip, the nano will only take video and doesn’t take photos. You can manually add photos to the nano from your computer, but you can’t use the onboard camera to capture stills.)

Another thing that bugs me a bit about the new iPod nano is the bizarre placement of the camera lens. It’s nestled down in the corner of the backside below the screen — exactly where it is most natural to hold this thing if you are shooting with it. Even if you just grasp the thing at the corners, there’s a tendency for some part of a finger to accidentally edge into the camera frame. In fact, I found that even after I was aware of this fact I kept doing it anyways — the way this thing fits in my hands just makes it likely I’ll catch an edge of a finger in my shots unless I’m conscientious about avoiding it, and that detracts from the spontaneity this is designed to take advantage of. (I even noticed I’d done it on most of the iPod nano footage for this video comparison — and I thought about doing it over, but then chose to leave it in just to show how easily it can happen.)

So, to sum up: what you really get with the iPod nano is a toy camera, fun to have in the pocket and very cool to have just in case there’s something you want to shoot, but not quite the quality we’ve come to expect from the handy pocket camcorders like the Flip Mino and the Creative Vado and the Kodak Zi8, that keep getting better and better. Video is a nice new feature on the Nano, but not really a radical innovation and not a game changer.

What makes the iPod Nano worth it is that in addition to video on the glide, you get to listen to music, you get an FM radio that works quite well and even tells you what song you are listening to, you get a voice recorder (a VERY nice feature, brilliant for students who can listen to music on their way to class and then record a lecture), a decent quality mini speaker, a somewhat useful pedometer, decent game options for killing time. You don’t get any of that with the Flip! Sure, the new iPod nano is a toy … but it’s a very cool toy.

It’s thin as ever and the new aluminum surface is smooth and attractive. In terms of how to hold the iPod while taking videos, just hold the iPod sideways or upside down (the camera, which is located in the lower left corner, will realign the screen image right-way up). Taking video is intuitively simple (press the center of the wheel to start and stop) and I was pleased with the image quality– though it’d be a mistake to expect the Nano to match the quality of the higher-end video cameras. Then again, I doubt savvy buyers would make that mistake in the first place. I should also mention that the speaker quality isn’t stellar, and that to listen to the radio on the Nano, you have to have your earphones plugged in– the rest of the functions, like video, movies and music, are audible unplugged. Sound quality when the earphones ARE plugged in is obviously far better than not.

To sum up: it’s classic Apple in its simple, sleek, light-weight exterior. It has the fun new functions of taking video and having a built-in radio (which has a Live Pause option). If you’re a casual user and don’t reckon you’ll get hung up on image quality from the video camera, or speaker quality (though both are far from “terrible”, anyway), I’d recommend the new Nano highly.

2) Video is a cool feature BUT you have to really struggle to comfortably take a video and really see what you’re doing because your hand will be in the way of your eyesight, WOW SO MUCH FOR ERGONOMICS OF THE NEW NANO!!!