News, Review, and Pictures of the new Apple iPod nano!

With its color screen, Apple tells us the iPod nano can hold up to 25,000 photos which you can scroll through with the Click Wheel - but at 1.5", you better have great eyes to see these photos..(will also display album cover art - in bright color!) Like the older iPods, the nano also lets you bring your calendar and contacts along (Address Book and iCal for the Mac, Outlook for the PC). Also clock and alarm and snooze features. Now personally, at $200, I expect an armband to be thrown into the package - no such luck. Apple wants an extra $29 bucks from you for that. For $39 they will sell you the "lanyard headphones" which look like a necklace/headphone combo. Again, for $200, I'd like to see some of this stuff in the box. All in all, Apple scores with another design coup. It's a gorgeous little player, with everything good we've come to expect from the iPod family (minus the Shuffle of course..)

UPDATE:
Having had one of these things for the last year, here are my comments on it. First of all, the finish on these original models was just plain terrible. Just carrying this black nano around in my sweatpants pocket back and forth to the gym has left it totally scratched up -- I mean pretty bad stuff. And this was with pretty gentle use and care. Since then I have purchased a cover for it to protect, which generally works great while still giving you access to the thumbwheel. Any reason Apple couldn't have provided one of these $2 items in the box, or built a more durable casing around it in the first place? Sure, style and look count for something in the marketing world, but come on, if the product looks terrible 2 months later who cares? Sound overall is excellent, as is the classic iPod interface - no complaints there. Last major complaint is the backlight -- totally unusable unless you keep this thing docked and charged every night. The only time I would use the backlight was when pushing FFWD from one song to the next, in which case it comes on by itself for all of 4 seconds or whatever. I was getting maybe 3-4 hours of playback time under this scenario, which is a joke. So I have disabled the backlight permanently, and now the screen is barely readable, but at least I can get 12-15 hours to a charge. So in closing, yes, the iPods look nice (at least out of the box), sound nice, and sure are popular, but I would consider other MP3 models for my next purchase before just upgrading to the latest iPod.