Earlier in 2005, the Duo took a look at MP3 players, including the big three from Apple Computer: the IPod, the IPod Mini, and the IPod Shuffle. Since then, Apple has begun to move away from using hard drives in its players. The company has discontinued the Mini, which was very popular, and replaced it with the IPod Nano. Angela and Steve could hardly wait to get their fingers--and especially their fingerprints--all over the new gadget.
A 2GB Nano, which Apple says holds 500 songs, costs about $200; the 4GB model holds twice that but costs only $50 more. It has a color screen for photos and album covers and that sort of thing--and Steve would love to have a bunch of vacation photos to show off on the Nano at this point, but after ITunes processed about 1000 of them from his Windows machine, the Nano refused to accept any of them.
That technical faux pas aside, the Nano is much more like the regular IPod than the Shuffle, which lacked a screen and a lot of other things. (Including quality control, snipes Angela.) The Nano operates like a hard-drive IPod, with the click wheel and center button, and because it uses flash memory, it's skip-proof. It's very slim, too. Angela wore it in on her forearm under a long-sleeved sweater, and no one would have known it was there if she hadn't kept pressing on her arm to change tracks.
The armband was, when the Duo tested the Nano, more than just a fashion necessity. This unit is a bit of a delicate flower. Some screens have cracked. Apple hemmed and hawed about those problems early on. But the online message boards went berserk, and once the first class-action suit turned up, Apple agreed to replace the worst units. The company has since begun shipping Nanos with a handy case to protect the little gadgets from the worst of the problem.
Steve, after grousing about Apple's lack of support for digital-music subscriptions--if you look carefully, you'll see Angela rolling her eyes during that speech--says he's still not sold on the whole digital-music-player thing. However, he notes, anyone in need of quickie portable storage might view this as a device that tosses in a music and picture (maybe) player for not much more than a memory-only USB drive ... though the USB connector's not built into the Nano, so you'd have to haul around a cable.
Angela can't even begin to decode that transmission from Planet Steve. Instead, she turns her attention to an even smaller, even cuter, player: the MobiBlu DAH-1500i, which is less than an inch on each side of its cubic self. It holds 1GB of music, costs about $130, and includes an FM radio and recorder, not to mention a recorder for the FM radio. She found the user interface a little tricky to manage because the two sets of buttons are on opposite sides of the cube, and you have to hold the thing just so to manipulate it. Still, it holds a gigabyte and costs not much more than a 1GB USB drive, so if you can handle hauling that cable around, it's a good deal.
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