Nano, Shuffle are small but pack strong punch

By Brendan Lynch

Apple gets a lot of flak for what some call an “Apple tax” because their products can be expensive. But earlier this year, the company released a pair of updated iPods, the Nano and the Shuffle, that offer a lot of fun without completely draining your wallet.

The Nano, though tiny, is a relatively full-featured device compared to the Shuffle. The square MP3 player has a full-color touchscreen taking its entire front side. It has three physical buttons on top to turn it on and off and to control the volume. Everything else is handled through the touchscreen interface, which gives you options for getting at your songs by artist, song, album and playlist, as well as icons for its other applications.

Since there’s no “home” button like on an iPhone or iPod Touch, navigating back to the icons from a song screen is entirely swipe-based. Swiping through the screens gets you different controls for moving back and forward through tracks, or for advancing within a track. Two swipes to the left gets you back to the home screen. The controls are so simple, it can be easy to forget how to get where you want to go, making you feel stuck, but that’s easily fixed with some random gestures.

The Nano comes in an 8GB model for $150 or 16GB for $180.

Even with the limited size, the Nano packs in a radio tuner, photo album, pedometer and voice recorder. The photo album isn’t much use at the small size, but the radio tuner (which works by using the headphones as an antenna) is a great bonus feature. Reception worked best with the headphones it came with, but also worked with non-Apple headphones.

The Shuffle is tiny - since it doesn’t have a screen, you’re taking your chances on what song it plays next. The controls take up the entire front of the device - buttons for play/pause, next/previous track, and to increase/decrease volume arranged on a circle.

The on-switch has two settings letting you play your songs in alphabetical order or at random. To make up for the lack of a screen, the Shuffle has a small button on top. When you press it, a robotic voice reads you the song playing and its singer. It’s an amusing novelty, and though the voice is stiff, it pronounced every band and song name I tried correctly.

The Shuffle also lacks the standard jack that iPods and iPhones use to connect to power outlets and computers. Instead, the headphone jack doubles as the power and computer jack, with no perceivable effect on the sound, the speed of transferring songs or charging.

The Shuffle comes with 2 GB of memory for $50, a reasonable price for an impressive MP3 player. The only downside I can see is it might be easy to lose since it’s so small.

Both players come with clips on the back to attach to clothing - they’re so small they can be awkward to hold. Both produce full-sounding audio to match much bigger devices and nothing sounded tinny.