iPod Nano

The new iPod Nano.

Wow, this thing is thin. And it has a cam­era?(Damn Mac Observ­er) Col­or screen?

Oh, I do believe I’m in love. Yes, I’m in love with a gad­get. It’s sick and I need help.

So, after brows­ing Apple’s site after today’s announce­ment, I’d say that the Nano has replaced the Mini alto­geth­er. Giv­en that the Nano is sol­id state all the way through it’s thin lit­tle body, this is good. No more spin­ning hard dri­ves to dam­age. It also shares the clas­sic iPod look, where as the Mini had that mul­ti-col­or alu­minum look, which I per­son­al­ly did­n’t care for. It would have looked great on any oth­er com­pa­ny’s MP3 play­er, but not an iPod.

The new Motoro­la ROKR E1, the first iTunes phone.

Also announced today was the long-await­ed and much talked about iTunes phone: the Motoro­la ROKR E1. Motoro­la has a pret­ty bad rep­u­ta­tion when it comes to user inter­face but builds rock-sol­id and styl­ish phones. I’ll have to play with one before I can com­ment on the phone-side inter­face, but the iTunes por­tion looks pret­ty good. Accord­ing to the Apple FAQ, the phones are to ship with a 512MB Trans­Flash card, which by Apple stan­dards is good for 120+ songs. Not too bad. This is the same capac­i­ty as the small­er iPod Shuf­fle, but in this case you have the abil­i­ty (I believe) to add larg­er cards in the future. My under­stand­ing is 1GB Trans­Flash cards should be avail­able soon. Too bad this thing isn’t stan­dard SD com­pat­i­ble. I know that most oth­er phones aren’t, either, but hey, it’d make life sim­pler. Any­way, I’m look­ing for­ward to check­ing one out, even if it only avail­able through Cin­gu­lar in the states.

My ques­tions regard­ing the ROKR:

• Q: This phone has Blue­tooth. Will Cin­gu­lar crip­ple it so I can’t trans­fer any­thing? If so, then can I use the USB 1.1 cable to trans­fer data? If not, then can I put data on the Trans­Flash card via a card read­er and then use it on the phone? I’m think­ing about trans­fer­ing pic­tures from the cam­era and con­tact info. A: Songs (and pre­sum­ably pho­tos) can­not be trans­fered via Blue­tooth, only USB, which is slow. Engad­get report­ed tak­ing near­ly 45 min­utes to trans­fer 100 songs. It does not sync pho­tos with iPho­to on a mac, either. Songs trans­fered via card-read­er method do not play in iTunes at all and the oth­er media play­er reportably stinks.
• Q: Will Cin­gu­lar pre­vent me from using the songs on my phone (that I legal­ly bought) as ring tones, etc? That seems like a log­i­cal use of an iTunes phone to me, but also some­thing Cin­gu­lar might want to con­trol. A: Sure enough, Cin­gu­lar has no inten­tion of giv­ing up the lucra­tive ring-tone mar­ket. iTunes songs can­not be used for any­thing oth­er than lis­ten­ing in iTunes.
• Q: What is the rest of the user inter­face like? What is the OS of this phone. A: To quote Engad­get, the inter­face is typ­i­cal Motoro­la, or in their words, “pedes­tri­an.” After view­ing some of their pho­tos, the inter­face on my Sprint vTech phone looks much nicer, and that’s hard­ly say­ing anything.

If I find the answers to any of these ques­tions, I’ll post them here and link the source.

Update 9/8/2005 — Accord­ing to Engad­get, Motoro­la says that Apple has lim­it­ed the num­ber of songs that can be trans­fered to the phone to 100, no mat­ter the size of the flash card or how large the files are. This is kind of a deal breaker.

Update 9/14/2005 — Engad­get (got­ta love those guys) have answered a buck­et-load of read­er sub­mit­ted ques­tions about the Motoro­la ROKR. The short of it: I have zero inter­est in this phone. As a mat­ter of fact, the only sell­ing point of it is the abil­i­ty to sync to iTunes. Oth­er­wise, it is real­ly not an espe­cial­ly nice phone at all.