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The Interface
The
screen on the Nano is tiny so taking pictures of the interface
features was somewhat challenging. However, I enabled macro mode and
took out my tripod and did the best I could with them. The interface on
the Nano is loaded with features and I can't possibly show you every screen.
With that said, we'll take you through some of the most useful...
The default main menu will look like the
above. However, as I'll show in the settings menu a bit later, you can
customize this menu to your liking. Let's go over each of these menu
items
in detail...
Music Menu
From the Music Menu, you can browse your collection by artist, albums,
songs, genres and more. You can also access the podcasts you have
subscribed to from here as well.
Photo Menu
The
Ipod Nano lets you store your photos and can even be set up to sync with your
My Pictures folder on a WinXP system. Personally, I think this is quite
useless and they should seriously focus on other more important features I
will get to later. The screen is so small, that it really isn't
suitable for image viewing. However, there are a slew of features
which include thumbnail viewing and even some pretty nifty transition effects.
Extras Menu
The
extras menu is also loaded with additional features. Again, some
useful and some quite pointless. The world time clock can be changed
easily for those who travel and there is even alarm capabilities. The
Nano comes with four games, including Solitaire...of course. The
Calendar is quite nice and is almost as full-featured as those found on MS Smartphones. You can even setup appointments with alarm functionality.
Other features include contacts, notes and a stopwatch.
Settings Menu
From the settings menu, you can make additional changes, such as the
backlight timer, palyback options and changes to the main default menu we
showed you in the first screenshot above. The EQ is quite nice and
does offer a nice variety of presets to suit each style of music.
Playback features
While there are some nice features here, this is where the Ipod still tends
to fail in comparison to a wide variety of other MP3 players on the market.
The main reason I still do not like Ipods is simply due to the poor playback
features. I had high hopes with the Nano but unfortunately, they still
haven't gotten it quite right. More on why in
a bit...
The
Now Playing screens are excellent. In fact, I can confirm that the
Ipod Nano does indeed support song lyrics. What you'll need to do is
download Version 5 of iTunes. There are a couple of screens where you
can import album art and also cut & paste your song lyrics. You can
switch through each screen easily by pressing the center button. There
is even a screen that will let you rate your music, which in turn,
will basically generate a play list based on your high rating.
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This is where I have a problem with the Nano. Most of the older Ipods
did not support on-the-fly playlists. While the Nano does
feature what they call "On-The-Go" playlists, it does not work very well.
It is quite disappointing because this is a feature I use all the time on my
Karma and on other Creative players I've owned in the past. I think it
is that important, and they seriously need to focus on making it
better. Working with On-The-Go playlists on the Nano was quite
unpleasant. For one, if browsing by artist, and the submenu contains
more than one song, it will add all the songs to the playlist even if you
only select one. In fact, even if you don't use this feature and
try to playback only one song from an artist, it adds all the rest of them
to the queue as well. Also, unlike the excellent Rio Karma, I could
not add songs to the On-The-Go playlist while actually listening to a song.
This is bad, and I sure hope they do work on this and possibly even release
a firmware upgrade to fix it. However, seeing that Ipods are mostly
now in 5th generation with no improvements in these areas, I doubt I'll see this corrected with the Nano.
Too bad, as it is my only major gripe with this player. Quite
frustrating....to say the least.
Podcasts you subscribe to in iTunes will
automatically be transferred to the Nano upon connecting the player to the
PC. These streams are constantly updated and the new ones will be
transferred as long as you are still subscribed to them. Podcasting is
great, and once you get into them, you'll be hooked.
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