My second ipod - much much better than ipod mini

My first iPod was an iPod mini. It had fair battery life to start, only held 4GB and was pretty big (in comparison to the iPod nano). Within a few months the battery life went from fair to pss-poor. And with how much I listen to music (quite infrequently), this was terrible.

So I won some contest a little while back and I my prize was an iPod nano 2nd edition, 8GB, and I love it.

It is about 30% the size of my iPod mini.
It is about 10% the weight of my iPod mini.
It has about three times the original battery life of the iPod mini (probably 8x now with my mini's degraded battery life).
The screen is so much more vibrant with COLOR. The iPod mini's monochrome screen was really getting old to me.
The read access times for the music are much better since the mini uses flash memory where as the Mini used an actual drive (if im not mistaken?).


Sure, there are a few things I dont like about it.
They have moved the headphone port from the top of the unit to the bottom. It is annoying for a few reasons:
1) who places the unit in their pocket upsidedown? With the port on the top you just placed it in your pocket rightside up. HOWEVER, i understand the purpose of this move. When using the unit in your pocket you are inclined to be pointing the unit down. So with the headphone port on the bottom the unit there is no wrap around. But I am thinking in terms of Ronco - set it and forget it. A lot of people use their iPods in shuffle mode and dont fool with the unit.

2) The location of the headphone port on the bottom is so close to the power port. Because of it's proximity, it is near impossible to unplug the power cable without first unplugging the headphone cable. Very very annoying.

3) The touch-wheel, at least on my BLACK unit, is the same color as the unit itself. It is hard to see the ends of the wheel. I often find myself scrolling on the unit and not the wheel. At least with the iPod mini I knew where the wheel met the aluminum.

4) There is no power unit. My iPod mini came with a nice charging unit which let you charge it from the wall. They have since abandoned this and you are now forced to charge the iPod from a computer with the included USB cable. I want my charging unit back :(. I understand that the iPod box is smaller and thus wont fit the power unit, but why not make a smaller power unit???

5) Apple assumes you have the internet. What do I mean here? Well in old units, you used to get iTunes on a CD. Install iTunes and be on your way to copying music. Now? The manual tells you to goto Apple's website and download iTunes. It is not a problem for people with internet, but what if the user doesnt have internet access? Now you are forcing them to goto the library to download iTunes? What about dialup users? iTunes is like 20+ MB in size, that will take hours on dialup! Bad move. I think they should have at least included one of those mini-CD's with iTunes. Those mini-CD's hold like 135MB of data, enough for iTunes and more (quicktime, safari, etc.).



Other than that I love the unit. It is small, portable and very lightweight. Makes me WANT to listen to music more than I have in the past.



Oh, Let me quickly make some expected comments about the technical side of things:

The image quality of the screen is fine, right on par with all of the other Apple products. Clear, colorful and enjoyable. I have no qualms with it.

Sound quality is good enough for me. I do not use Apple's included headphones because I dont like to give away that Im using an iPod (to decrease chances of having it stolen) and I know they are not as good as my other headphones. I use my Koss KSC75 headphones, which are known to produce good bass. It sound perfectly fine with them on. I dont think Im getting EXCELLENT sound, like the bass isnt all that great, but it still works out fine. Besides, the music Im putting on here is already compressed :P. And no, the equalizer does not work...junko equalizer - though I didnt expect much from this department.

File support is as expected: MP3 and Apple MP4. No support for WMA (BOOO!!!!) or really any other popular format (OGG, FLAC, etc.). Oh well. 99.99% of my music is MP3, anyway. Stupid album in WMA format constituting that 0.01%...BAHHHHHH!

Anapod Explorer works great with this unit. I hate iTunes and wanted a way to just drag and drop music without having to click buttons and stuff - hopefully to have an explorer integrated option. Anapod Explorer provides just that - an explorer integrated, drag and drop solution. I love it.