Apple’s new nano 5G – has it got it right finally?
Well, Apple has certainly been busy over the winter (that’s the Aussie winter for you overseas readers) with changes to most of its iPod/iPhone range. Clearly though, the most work this time has gone into the Nano. Portable music devices of the nano’s ilk have always been popular but while the nano has been good value, it has always lacked the extra features of other brands.
But it looks as though Apple may have got the nano just right – video capture is certainly the bonus few expected but with FM radio and microphone built in, the nano now becomes a far more well-rounded device that relies less on third-party add-ons. At this stage, Apple doesn’t mention how long you can capture 640×480-pixel/30fps video for, neither in terms of storage or in terms of battery life, but it appears there’s no change to audio and video playback with the battery rated at 24 and five hours, respectively.
The other new feature is the new 14:9 widescreen LCD panel – it’s not quite 16:9 – but it’s better than 4:3 and better suited to watching movies.
The only thing I can see so far that I don’t like about the new nano – without doing my normally complete set of audio tests – is the built-in battery. Apple is not alone in doing this but it certainly has gone along way to making internal batteries par-for-the-course for portable media players these days.
We’ll wait to see the quality of the VGA image sensor before we declare the video recording aspect a roaring success but no doubt the nano will have executives from other media player vendors such as Sandisk and Sony scratching their heads right about now…
[EDIT: If you take a look at the spec page for the new nano on Apple's website, you'll notice that there are no specifications of the video playback support. Audio is included (and is as expected) but there's nothing on video playback/codec support. Given the video capture is H.264, it is likely that H.264 and MPEG4 codecs are support however, what's not known is whether playback resolution is the standard 320x240-pixels or whether you can use the full 376x240-pixel resolution. We have a request into Apple on this so, standby...]
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