BusinessWeek’s Stephen Baker thought he’d buy a nice little Apple iPod nano and load its flash memory with four gigs of his favorite songs. As it happened, the nanos were out of stock. So Baker ended up buying a 30GB black video-capable iPod.

“Seeing is believing. It’s beautiful, less than a half-inch thin and elegant. The sound quality is terrific, but that came as no surprise. Except for the thinness, I would have said much the same about my future hockey puck a year ago. It wasn’t until I hitched the new iPod to the computer and began touring the iTunes site that I began to give fervent thanks that the nanos had been out of stock,” Baker writes. “The difference is video: crystal-clear images on a bright color screen. Though I had barely considered video when buying the iPod, I quickly turned on the iTunes site to video podcasts… I felt like I had the future of video in my hands — or at least one important outlet for it — and all I wanted was more.”

“The fragility of the iPod remains my biggest concern (Baker sat on his last iPod)… Since the new iPod is thinner and a tad wider — to allow for the bigger screen — it looks a bit like an elegant deer wrapped in a moose’s hide… my advice is to get one of these devices — and hold onto it tightly while catching the coming mobile video boom from a front-row seat,” Baker writes.

Full article here.
The Apple iPod is no wider than the previous generation; it’s 2.4-inches wide, the same as before. The screen is wider, not the unit’s width. See, we know the width of every iPod model that Apple’s ever sold; just another reason why we’re such a surefire hit at parties.

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