Digital Trends

Apple iPod nano 4GB

September 14th, 2005 | by Ian Bell

Setup and Use

If you are familiar with any of Apple's Click Wheel used in other versions of the iPod you will feel right at home with the nano since its exactly the same. The Click Wheel is used for controlling playback (pause, play, fast-forward, rewind and accessing the menus.)  The nano uses the same easy to use touch-sensitive part of the wheel to scroll menus, browse music and control the volume.  The Click Wheel can make it a little tricky at first to skip songs (we frequently end up changing the volume instead due to the thumb sliding ever so slightly in one direction or other), but after some use it becomes easier to do.  This is an important note, since we can envision many people using the nano while working out, where switching tracks by feel is ideal instead of pulling it out of a pocket or off an armband.

As mentioned in the previous section, there are several new features with the nano is capable of. Besides the obvious which is the color screen, the nano also has a built in Stopwatch, World clock, and a Built-in Screen lock feature. The Stopwatch feature is what you would expect, a timer you can use for working out to or timing someone else. It features the ability to record multiple sessions, best lap time etc. You can then save the lap time to compare later on. The built-in World clock lets you set multiple clock times for various world time zones. You can then compare the time from two different zones on the screen if you want. If you travel a lot, you can set multiple sleep timers for each time zone. It's a nifty feature that not everyone might use, but it shows some thoughtfulness on Apple's part. The last new feature is called Screen Lock. This lets you essentially assign a pass code to your iPod nano that allows only those with the code to have access to it. Have a little brother that keeps stealing your iPod nano? Don't sweat it, just lock the darn thing!

We made sure to download the latest Apple iTunes, version 5 which was announced on the same day for use with our iPod nano. iTunes is available for both the Mac and the PC. As expected, we had no problems with connecting our iPod nano to our Windows XP system using iTunes. Accessing the iPod nano using iTunes is no different really than previous iPods. If you have more than one iPod in your household, make sure to name the nano accordingly so that iTunes knows this is a different player. For those of you who have not previously owned an iPod, or an iPod photo for that matter, transferring photos to the nano works in pretty much the same fashion as transferring songs. Simply use the “photos” tab in iTunes to pull pictures from your designated folder to the nano.

Apple iTunes 5.0