No moving parts, tiny, big memory: great player for deployment!

The iPod nano is the missing link between the Shuffle and the bigger iPod, and may be the only player you need to take downrange with you.

A while back, I wrote a review on how useful the the iPod Shuffle

You may be thinking, why get this instead of a regular iPod? I'll tell you: this is the player you want when you are on the move. It's tiny, it's light, and best of all, it's flash-based, not hard drive-based. This means you don't have to worry about any moving parts, so you can run with it, you can bump around in a ground convoy with it, you don't have to worry about whether the jolt of the C-130 combat landing is going to damage your hard disk, because you don't have one.

OK, then, why is this better than the wee little Shuffle? In most ways, this is a fully functional iPod, with all of the bangs and whistles (see below), while the Shuffle is a white stick that plays music, either randomly or in orders that you can only change when your Shuffle is connected to a computer with iTunes. And a 4 GB nano holds 4x what a 1 GB Shuffle holds. If all you need is a tiny stick to hold music, the Shuffle will work, but the nano gives you control.

Some of the pros for the nano:

Storage: voluminous. Again, compared to the paltry 512 megabytes of my Shuffle, the 4 gigabyte space of the nano seems difficult to fill. Although I have thousands of songs on my 20 GB Gmini, the library on that player is, by and large, an unorganized dumping ground. I've tried to be much more selective about which songs I put on my nano. The result is that, so far, I only have 676 songs loaded on the nano, and I still have 827 MB left to fill, or around 200 more songs. And while many of those songs are in the 3-minute category Apple clearly contemplated when they claimed this player can hold 1,000 songs, others are much longer (Miles Davis's "Autumn Leaves" weighs in over 10 minutes, for example). So if you're not into live Phish or live jazz, you can fit a LOT on here. With the Shuffle, I had 110 songs, and they rotated a lot. I very rarely get repeats on the nano during different shuffle play sessions.

Size: Wee. Itty-bitty. Miniscule. OK, you want technical, I'll give it to you: 1.5 ounces, 1/4 inch thick, 3.5 inches long, 1.6 inches wide. Not exactly credit card sized, but it's really small. Without body armor on, it'd be a cinch to fit it into the breast pocket of your BDUs, DCUs, or ACUs without anyone knowing it's there. With body armor, I'd put it in your shoulder pockets -- see "Survivability" below. I barely know it's there when I'm running with it. And it's so light that, the one time I dropped it, it didn't pull the phones out of my ears and the headphone jack didn't pull itself out; it just dangled there. I wouldn't try this at home, though. Bottom line, it's not going to take up your space at all.

Interface: simple. The innovative click wheel Apple first showed us with the original iPod is easy to control and use. In fact, sometimes you may find it is all too easy -- because the play button powers it on, and the wheel responds at the lightest touch, you WILL want to have the "hold" button on if you don't want to accidentally power it on or skip songs or anything while you're on the move. Also, when I'm running and want to use the wheel to adjust volume or to scroll through the menu (to get to the stopwatch option, for example), the wheel seems a little too responsive. But then that's likely because, when I'm trail running, I am a big, sweaty oaf, and it's hard to make precise movements.

Display: For the small size (I'm spoiled by the huge display on my Archos Gmini 400, the display is bright and easy to read. The plethora of backlight timer settings is great. Also, I was always annoyed that my Gmini display was either on or off. Apple made it much easier by keeping the LCD on all the time (why not? it's a low power draw) and turning the backlight on and off.

Bells and whistles: I expected to have music on this, and be able to poke around in different ways (shuffle, genre, etc.) without many extras. After all, this is a small player. I was therefore very surprised to find that this offers a lot more options, the surfaces of which I've barely scratched. It has games: Solitaire, Parachute (which I haven't seen in years!), a Breakout clone, and must interestingly, a music quiz (test your friends!) that gives you a timed clip and multiple choice to name that tune. It has an address book and a notes section. It has a clock function that gives you as many clocks as you want (sadly, though it has Berlin, DC, Kuwait City, Baghdad, and Kabul, it doesn't give you Zulu/Greenwich Mean Time), with an alarm option. It has a stopwatch with lap option (and will store your past times).

Fine, fine, fine. You really like it, Deichert, we can tell that. What DOESN'T it do? Some cons:

Survivability: The nano is good for light work, but obviously is not made for a tactical environment. It will scratch the second you take it out in the sand. I can pretty much guarantee it. So do yourself a favor and get one of those silicon skins. Also, the thinness makes me paranoid that I might snap it in two. Be careful where you put it. Since I bought it in the rear, I'm not sure how it will do in 122-degree heat, so be careful with it and don't leave it in the sun.

Battery: Not interchangeable. Hardly surprising, because the nano is, what, 1/4 inch thick? But eventually, you're going to run out of juice when you don't want to, and further down the line, it's not going to charge like it used to. An external battery pack might come in handy here. I had found one, the iLuv 601, that doubles as a silicon sleeve that racks the battery life out for 36 extra hours (56 total). HOWEVER, I have to recommend against this particular product. jWin (the manufacturer) must have a horrible quality control department, because the sound on my first one kept cutting in and out, and the second one only broadcast sound through one channel. I'm taking it back today, and I will NOT be exchanging it for a third.

Shiny: Yes, this is a drawback in a tactical environment. Whether you get a white or black nano, it's going to be shiny plastic on the front, and worse, shinier chrome on the back. Again, this is where one of those silicon skins comes in handy. (And in a worst-case scenario, you can always use your nano as a signal mirror, I suppose.)

Price: OK, this is a big one. The Shuffles are pretty pricey at ~ $100. And you can get a full-fledged iPod for around the same price as a nano that will hold a lot more. Why is this $250? Because it fills a vital niche and Apple knows enough people will pay for it. I'm not happy that I had to pay this much, but the portability and storage space are worth it.

Accessories: I know I need to have a computer to run iTunes and load this up with music, but I'm a little surprised that Apple expects me to only use a computer to recharge. Put another way: where's my AC adapter? I'm a little irritated that Apple couldn't include this accessory in the box ($29.00 for the Apple accessory part).

Firmware: The bells and whistles above are really neat, but I was surprised to see that they take up 21 MB of storage space. OK, in the grand scheme of things, that's only 0.5% of the total room, I know. But it's a couple songs more I could have, and heck, Windows 3.1 needed less hard drive space (15 MB). It would be nice to have the ability to choose what parts of the firmware I could keep and what I could dump. (Or, if I can do this, it'd be nice if I was smart enough to have read that part of the manual.)

That's not a lot of bad. I could be like other reviewers and complain about the lack of a remote, but come on! This thing is tiny! A toddler can hold it in one hand! Why do you need a remote? Sheesh!

Bottom line: I bought it, I use it, I really like it. It's worth spending one month's hostile fire pay on it. Just don't use it on guard duty.