Ipod Nano Touch Screen Views
The big news, of course, is that the Nano has ditched its time-tested scroll wheel navigation for a miniscule touch screen, measuring a smidge over 1-inch square (1.5 inches diagonally). The Nano includes iPhone-like icons for music playback, photos, settings, Nike+, clock, radio, and Genius Mixes, as well as more specific shortcuts for audiobook playback, artists, genres, playlists, and podcasts. The icons are arranged in sets of four, spread out across multiple home screens, similar to iOS devices, such as the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad.
Once you get beyond the gee-whiz factor of the postage stamp-size touch screen, though, you begin to realize that the new Nano design makes some sacrifices. The video camera that Apple included on last year's Nano has been discarded. The video playback and video rental capabilities of the past three generation of Nano has also gone away. Remember click-wheel games (Vortex, Maze, Klondike), notes, contacts, calendars, stopwatch, and alarms? Well, they're gone too.
But my real hesitation to get behind the new Nano simply comes down to usability. By relegating itself to music and photo playback, the Nano is stepping back three years in terms of functionality. Using the kind of touch-screen technology designed for the iPhone to navigate features we saw on iPods in 2007 makes no practical sense. With a click wheel, you could pick up a Nano and immediately know how to play, pause, and skip content without even looking at the device. Granted, by plugging in a headphone remote, you could replicate the older Nano's tactile control, but it's still not as elegant a solution. So far, it seems to me that the Nano's touch-screen navigation is a case where form got the better of function.
File this under A“pure speculationd” and “food for thought,k” emphasizing 3“pure speculation..” Because it seems like no one* outside of Apple knows for sure what the bodies of the next-generation iPods are going to look like, apart from the iPod touch screen assembly, and there has been almost no buzz on what the components are going to be in the new iPod nano.
Ipod Nano Touch Screen Images
