Using my iPod nano - update 1
Before I give you an update on my nano experience, I couldn't resist using this image over at Colorware. Colorware is going to be selling color nanos and will paint your nano if you send it to them. The prices are high, but we will have a few colored nanos out there, I'm sure. I hear Colorware does really good work and I like that red one!
But now, back to my nano. I've actually stopped using it for the time being. I've already had two accidents with it in three days. First, while I was driving home from the store and had it sitting on the seat, things shifted on the seat due to a turn or stop and something nicked the screen. About 1/4" long on the edge, so not a big deal but it was brand new so it hurt a little.
Then, yesterday, I was carrying several things in my hands as I was going from my car to the local Starbucks and the feather-light nano slipped out of my hand and fell 3 feet onto the concrete. It got a 5/8" gash on it's chrome back but was fine otherwise.
I'm not exceptionally clumsy, so I'm guessing you may have this same problem. So think of this as a cautionary tale.
This morning, I carried my 60 gig iPod on my morning walk downtown. It's a fine little machine and feels really good in my hand with my new Vaja red and yellow leather case. But it is probably at least 5x bigger than my nano with a similar case would be. It's fine as long as you don't want to bring lots of other devices like a digital camera, PDA and cell phone with you. I settled on bringing my Treo and my color iPod. Excellent.
But, of course, I don't want to leave my nano on the shelf. It's time is now. I do want to mention that the being a two iPod person is a very reasonable, though expensive, proposition for many of us.
I like having my 60 gig iPod for my full photo collection with high rez images and my full music collection. I'm syncing it to my G5 whose 160 gig internal drive has room for master iTunes and iPhoto libraries. And, I think the 4 gig nano is going to be a perfect satellite to my Powerbook.
Hard drive space is at a premium on my 80 gig Powerbook. I want to make some strategic decisions about my Powerbook's iTunes so that it will stay underneath the 4 gig capacity of my nano leaving me with the rest of my hard drive space for all the other stuff I need on my Powerbook. A fairly large collection of podcasts is good. New music works. And, I've added some choice older music too. But I'm already near the limit. Remember, you actually only have 3.7 gigs to work with on the nano.
But I need to protect the pristine beauty of this little marvel. I'm waiting to find a case of some sort to protect it. For starters, I just want a little pouch for starters. If I had a sewing machine, I could make one in a hurry. I was thinking that if I sort through my stuff, I may find a business card carrier that will work. I can imagine the nano fitting into a slot in a wallet too.
All the local Apple store has is the armband which isn't how I want to carry my nano so that won't help (but the red armband is sharp). I'm wondering what Vaja can do with an iPod nano. They made a case for the shuffle, so a nano case can't be far behind.
By the way, my local Apple store has a whole table with about 20 nanos heavily wired for people to play with. You should see the scratching on the screens of those things. They're as bad as my 3G iPod got. I wonder how they've managed to get that scratched just being looked at even by a lot of people?
The good news, though, is the bright color screen makes it easy to read the screen even with a lot of scratching. That wasn't true on my 3G. It was almost unreadable. Still, I don't want that beautiful little color screen all scratched up.
I am guessing we will see all sorts of cases homemade and otherwise showing up on the web in the next week.
