The New iPod Nano; The Pros & Bugs!

iPods have pretty much revolutionised the way we listen to music! I mean having all your music collection in your pocket is, when you think about it, such an amazing thing, especially since now it is expanded to photos and movies, and music videos... I mean where will it end? Soon we won't need earphones as it will be beaming the music straight into your head... watch this space!

Today I am focussing on the new iPod Nano, which is a very clever piece of technology for it's size! It is the convenient size of a shuffle however you have so many more functions at your disposal! You can do playlists, it has the genius function, you can play by artist and you just have so much more control over what you listen to then you do with a shuffle, even though you can shuffle with the Nano as well. Of course there is a huge price difference, over £100 price difference!

Now, this new Nano comes in many colours, so there is one to suit everyone, it has a pedometer so while running and listening to your running playlist you can also count your steps (genius idea or what!?), it even has an inbuilt radio. It has everything but your kitchen sink in this thing!

You are probably thinking "Wow this thing is perfect!!" however, unfortunately it is not. It has a bug, a pretty big bug, and that is that you can't switch it off. So, they thought they would put a pedometer in this thing, yet didn't think to put an OFF button on it. Unfortunately, my Dad learnt this the hard way. He has a graphite 16gb Nano that he got for Christmas. He thought pressing the "sleep/wake" button switched it off, however no, when asleep the Nano will still be using battery power and you need to charge it up loads, as while asleep the battery runs out. I thought this to be really silly and thought there must be a way to switch it off and so googled it to try and find the answer! However, the only way to switch it off is to hold all 3 top buttons down until a black screen with yellow writing comes up, and that screen gives the option to turn the Nano off. However this is probably the equivalent of crashing your computer (switching the off button without properly shutting it down). But what else is there to do? You can't leave it running all the time, or when you need it most it will need charging...again! So this is a massive set back for the Nano!

The second drawback to this otherwise fabulous piece of equipment, is that the battery life (even when you figure out how to switch it off) is pretty poor, but I have noticed this on all Apple products (laptops, iPods, iPhones, though I don't know about the iPad, please fill me in). So the battery isn't going to last you a long time if you use it a lot on a daily basis, you will probably need to charge it on a daily basis. . Charging on a daily basis wouldn't be so bad if you have a charger, however this doesn't come with a charger. And this brings us onto my 3rd complaint! After spending that amount of money on a product, it sucks that the only way to charge it is to switch on your computer and charge it through your computer, so you have to leave your computer on for ages, just to charge it up, which probably uses more electricity then if you had a charger. Would it kill them to put the plug in there with it instead of having to buy it separately, so you are forking out yet more money to Apple?? .

So, are the bugs worth dealing with for the pros? Could you live with these drawbacks? And do you think all you need should be included in the set, rather then having to buy important parts of it separately?