Gadgetory

hey it's Nilay from the verge and this is the seventh generation iPod Nano it's the latest radical redesign of the Nano Apple seems to love changing this product as you can see the biggest change is this new 2.5 inch multi-touch display the old nano kind of looks like a watch and this one kind of looks very much like a tiny little iPhone it's even got a sleep/wake switch at the top it's got a volume rocker on the side in the middle that's actually a button to its play/pause and on the bottom you'll find the headphone jack and there's apple's new lightning connector as well the new nano comes bundled with apple's ear pods headphones which the company claims it's been working on for three years but to my ears they only sound marginally better it's really small and really light and it's nicely made but aesthetically it just doesn't quite fit with Apple's all the products of the new iPod touch with the new iPhone and that impression is kind of carried right over into this OS which is called the Nano OS it's not a OS and it's strange you can see that instead of rounded rectangles like on the iPhone and on the iPad Apple is using circles on the Nano to reinforce that it's a different OS and even a home button has a circle in it which is truly strange actually using the Nano is very basic and you press on music you get the standard iPod list that you're probably familiar with if you're in another part of the interface you can press the middle button to actually go back to whatever you're playing before which is convenient but it works somewhat inconsistently sometimes it really does just playing pause you can play videos the video player is a little funny musical layer so many different UI elements here you can see we've got the navigation controls and if we start changing the volume the volume controls overlay the navigation controls it's a really tiny screen it's kind of impressive that Apple's fitting so much information on to it but the overall value of this is somewhat unknown Apple knows that people love to use the Nano as a fitness device so they've baked Nike+ right in it'll play music at you you can set up our song when you plug it back in your computer it syncs with Nike Plus you can look at photos hilarious so you can pinch and zoom photos pretty funny on a device of this size there's a radio which lets you do radio stuff you can set presets you can hit pause for up to 15 minutes and come back and there's a clock the clock is actually a part of this that I find the most heartbreaking I was really hoping Apple would take the previous Nano and turn it into more of a watch and instead they retained a little bit of functionality with multiple watch faces but you can't download new watch faces from i2 anymore and you're limited only to these weird variations on green with the green arrow and that lack of choice actually carries over to the wallpaper strangely enough you can only pick from four patterns that match the color of the device so here I've got four green ones and gray I have no idea why Apple decided to restrict it like that but it's just a bizarre limitation on this device which should be able to let you set anything as a wallpaper so that's it that's the new ipod nano it's $149 it comes in a bunch of colors and it's probably one of the best iPods Apple's ever made but it's still an iPod you have to plug it in your computer with a cable you have to manage your files and iTunes you have to copy files to it and I suspect that if you're anything like me you don't want to do that anymore you use a service like Spotify or R do that stream sings from the cloud that syncs things to mobile automatically and I'm hoping with the next generation of iTunes and the next iPods Apple makes it catches up to where it's most forward-thinking competitors have already landed