“Now in its third generation, Apple’s iPod Nano gets a substantial redesign to accommodate games and video playback. Despite its changes–and Apple made many–the iPod Nano is still one of the smallest, thinnest, and most exquisitely designed MP3 players on the market. It’s also one of the most affordable, with a 4GB (silver) model offered for $149, and an 8GB (silver, black, red, green, or blue) model for $199. While the updated iPod Classic and the new iPod Touch are equally intriguing, the revamped Nano delivers the most bang for the buck,” Donald Bell reports for CNET.
“The 2-inch color screen packs a dense, crisp 320×240 video resolution that looks richer and brighter than that of any iPod to date. It’s not often that we deem a screen smaller than 2.5 inches worthy of video playback, but with a tightly packed 204 pixels per inch, the Nano looks incredibly sharp,” Bell reports.
“The Nano’s second-most impressive design improvement is its dramatically overhauled menu system. One of the most striking changes is a split-screen main menu that displays the menu on the right half of the screen and a picture related to the selection on the left,” Bell reports. “The third-generation Nano’s piece de resistance is its support for video playback. Like the Video iPod (now iPod Classic), the iPod Nano supports H.264 or MPEG4 video in either MOV, MP4, or M4V file formats, with a maximum resolution of 640×480 at as much as 30 frames per second.”
“At less than $200, the Nano offers one of the richest user experiences we’ve seen on an MP3 player,” Bell reports.
Full review, “Excellent” (8 out of 10), here.