Category: iPod

I’ve been waiting and waiting and waiting for a high capacity widescreen iPod. The rumor was the new iPod touch would include a video camera. I wasn’t that crazy about a video camera, but hoped for GPS. Instead Apple just delivered higher capacities with the 32 GB touch now $299 and a 64 GB touch for $399. A little disappointing. The only other thing that was added was a faster processor, although the low-end touch with 8 GB ($199) still has the old one.

The nanos got nice updates though. The price went down a little on the high end (8 GB $149, 16 GB $179), but they added a video camera, microphone, speaker, a little bit larger screen, and for the first time ever on an iPod: FM radio (including pausing radio, which I would rather have on my car since that’s the only time I usually listen to radio). So it’s a good time to get a nano, though just about everyone in our family already has one (it’s amazing how many nanos are in our family, see the timeline).

I was thinking I would get a touch, but I feel like Apple will add the camera and maybe the FM radio to the touch in January for the same price. Given that, I think if I buy now I will get the 32 GB touch instead of going “all in” on the 64 GB. 32 GB will still hold all of my music plus a decent selection of video (most of which I think I would have to re-encode from DivX .avi files to something Apple supports; even 64 GB wouldn’t hold all of my video) and plenty of apps.

I have owned both of these MP3 players for a while now. The Archos Jukebox Studio 20 since 2002 and the iPod nano 4G since 2008. I thought I would do a comparative review.

Form factor: The Archos is like a brick, weighing in at 10.2 oz compared to 1.2 oz for the nano. The Archos is 3.1 x 4.4 x 1.2 inches and the nano is 1.5 x3.6 x 0.24 inches. The nano fits in virtually any pocket and the Archos does not. Winner: nano

Display: The Archos has a 1.5 inch monochrome LCD screen with 112 x 64 pixels. The nano’s screen is nicer: 240 x 320 2 inch screen with full color. Both display battery level and have backlighting. Winner: nano

Continue reading “Archos vs. nano”

As mentioned earlier, I ordered a nano 4G and got it earlier this week. I really like it. When I got the 3G, I had a really hard time paring my music collection down to 8 GB, but with 16 GB of storage on the new nano, I can store pretty much everything I would want to listen to on any kind of regular basis. The difference in shape isn’t a big deal, but I think I prefer the narrow shape a little bit. I like the screen being able to reorient to portrait or landscape, but I loaded a bunch of pictures and they didn’t adjust correctly. Then when I turned the nano sideways, they adjusted back to incorrect again. I’m not sure how to fix that. The accelerometers also give the capability to play a kind of neat maze game where you tilt the nano to get a small marble to go through a maze. However, the problem is the screen is very small, so the marble is super tiny and it’s hard to see the maze. This is something I imagine that works a lot better with the larger screen of the iPod Touch.

Unrelated to getting the new nano, I reorganized my iTunes collection. On my desktop PC I had messed up my music collection by trying to rename files to include the track number at the beginning of the file name (I think I did this in order to burn MP3’s to disk so that my car stereo would read them in order). But I did something wrong and deleted a lot of songs and generally messed up the whole collection. Fortunately the laptop still had the collection intact and I was able to bring over all of my iTunes and Amazon song purchases. Then I just had to delete some duplicates, which took some time. Anyway, I’m in much better shape now.

I took my 3G nano over to Mom’s house today for her to borrow. I left all of my music on there, but put it back in the original tiny box (I hadn’t even used the headphones since I have my own). I didn’t even have to show her anything except how to use the wheel to scroll through stuff. She just figured stuff out really fast on her own and was soon listening to Randy Newman’s Faust. She said the sound was very good. Then I directed her over to Feist’s music video to show that it could do video and she enjoyed that for a couple of minutes. We decided that rather than set her up with an iTunes installation on her computer, I would just put music on there from my library plus add whatever CD’s of hers she wants me to rip. But she said I could do that later so she could play around with the iPod a little first.