If you don’t own a Nano, get one of these. If you do, you can probably do to wait. The improvements to this model are manifold but not amazingly compelling, especially considering we haven’t had much time to play with the genius features yet.
Let me begin by saying that the updated hardware is quite incongruous. After the tall nano and the fat Nano, I can’t really wrap my head around the candy bar Nano. It’s almost exactly the same size as the 2G nano but is considerably thinner and the colors are absolutely gorgeous. But what improvements do we see?
The “shake to shuffle” feature is genius and should be in every iPhone and Touch. It’s an amazingly great little idea – I never listen to an album straight through anymore so shuffling is my go to function. The genius features are nice and the accelerometer is a nice addition, especially for the landscape video and picture viewing. In this iteration, the Nano is more like the Touch than the iPod. It doesn’t have a touchscreen and still has the scroll wheel so the marriage of new and old is a bit jarring.
Overall, it’s a great portable iPod but except for the Genius playlist I can’t see anything compelling in the upgrade. I’m fine for the fat and 2G Nano for running and there is nothing that encourages me to pick this up for video.