Apple iPod nano 8 GB 5th Generation (Black)
by Apple Computer
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Our Price: $252.98 Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $87.00 (click here) Category: Network Media Player See more product details |
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Customers in the UK,
Buy this product at amazon.co.uk
for British Pounds
Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of Apple iPod nano 8 GB 5th Generation (Black)
Customer Review: I don't feel these things are worth the money.
Summary: 3 Stars
Hi,
I'm a pretty easy going guy. I don't think I'm hard to please. Here are my issues w/this ipod:
1) This is the fifth gen of this thing? My main gripe is the poor sound quality. I'm new to mp3s. I am not new to tech in general. I use the largest file format allowed (320k?). I bought a set of nice aftermarket ear buds (Sennheiser). The sound is still lacking. I would say only part of that is due to the Sennheisers not being as good as they should be. The EQ features on this ipod are surprisingly limited. You get about five preset choices, plus bass boost (doesn't sound like it), & bass scooping (sounds worse). It would be extremely easy to increase functionality by allowing the User to adjust bass/mid/treble to their tastes.
2) When registering the ipod @itunes. I left a credit card number. I had no intention of using it there, & never did. Yet, someone got ahold of my cc numbers, & ordered songs & software through the itunes store. Whether this was an Apple employee or a friend of his is irrelevant. Identity theft isn't something I think highly of. Certainly not from a tech company w/every available resource to make their site secure in-house. Inexcusable...
3) The menu is tedious & slow to navigate. Case in point. See the first complaint. When going between a song, & changing the EQ to try & find the best compromise. You have to go back through several screens to get to the EQ. That shouldn't be.
4) Everyone knows about Job-stein putting internal batteries in these to make unit replacement the only real option... Too bad he got called on secretly loading DRM software w/every itunes sale, huh? Too bad, Steve. No one likes a thief, but other thieves.
In short, I'm glad I won this thing as an award. I would not have paid for it. It is a ripoff. Even w/some of Jobstein's marketing thievery curtailed.
Customer Review: 5th vs 3rd Generation
Summary: 3 Stars
I currently own a 3rd Generation iPod, but finally decided to buy the 5th Gen. The main feature I wanted was the FM Radio, since the 3rd Gen still does everything else I am interested in.
The good:
- When it works, FM Radio is an excellent feature. You can pause Live Radio (similar to DVRs). You can tag the songs and find them later in iTunes. Screen also displays the name of the song and the artist, which is a great little feature.
- While I have no interest in shooting video with an iPod, I was quite impressed with the image quality. I don't think this is a feature I would have ever used, but it may be important for other users.
- I won't comment on the other iPod Nano features - there are plenty of reviews doing this. Sound and video quality are as good as they ever were. Software/menus are excellent.
The bad:
- FM Radio doesn't work as advertised. This will most surely be a different experience for different users, but for me, I have a very faint signal at home and no signal at all at work. By comparison, my 10 year old car radio has great signal everywhere. Same goes for all the other radios in my house.
The ugly:
- The radio antenna is in the earphones, meaning - if you want to listen to radio, you have to use the Apple earphones. I never liked them, have my own headphones, so this only made it more annoying.
In the end - decided to stick with the 3rd Gen and returned this to Amazon. If this feature doesn't work, I can't justify keeping it over the other one.
Customer Review: Best music player I've had
Summary: 5 Stars
The nano is an amazing little device. It holds more music than I own, is portable to the point of almost not being there, and switching out the crappy Apple earbuds that fall out if you tilt your head more than half a degree delivers a great experience for someone who skates.
There are some problems with it.
- The battery on the first unit I got REALLY hot during normal use, and would drain withing 20 minutes of listening to music. I wasn't even using it as a remote control for my BMW. I returned it to Amazon and the unit they sent worked great. I feel like this should be included in my review.
- The controls can be a bit laggy. Sometimes I'll hit pause/play and it takes a second to register, so I'll end up hitting it again and it starts playing again even when I just wanted to pause it. It feels like it has to "think" when you push buttons vs them being directly acted on.
- The volume can be a bit hard to get used to. Would much prefer buttons on the side of the unit instead of the slider. It's hard to control from inside your pocket sometimes if you're active (such as skateboarding). It's manageable but annoying. The volume also sometimes has the same lag as the other controls, resulting in a few seconds of REALLY LOUD music when I just wanted to bump it up a little.
Overall, except for the issues above, I really love the unit. It makes my daily commute enjoyable. The video feature is cool, but I don't have much use for it.
I love my ipod and would definitely recommend it.
Customer Review: A failure of a christmas gift.
Summary: 1 Stars
I bought this for a family member for christmas. I quite regret doing so.
It is a nice piece of hardware, and while expensive is reasonable for what you get. I think it's important that you consider the hardware and software in unison, as it is nothing more than a fisheyed digicam and (quite neat) radio without a computer to upload music. Being a 5G apple has changed something in the nano, rendering it incompatible with all itunes alternatives I've tried.
So, you're going to have to install itunes if you want to get music onto it.
Unfortunately, on this Windows 7, brand new laptop, itunes won't install. Looking on the itunes forums many others have the same issues.
I quite regret not getting an MP3 player that would just pop up as a USB drive and could have music just dumped on it. Apple could do it trivially, most other MP3 players work that way, but then no one would need itunes and they want you to install it.
But I can't, so I'm going to have to describe this product as a piece of cr*p.
Few minor points:
- No support for GNU/Linux or any non-win non-osx operating systems
- No FLAC or vorbis support
- Battery not removable
- Data connector has no cover and has very small contacts, time will tell how easily that clogs up
I certainly would not recommend this product to anymore. Depending on itunes would be fine if it were a reliable piece of software, but it's not, people have a lot of issues as evidenced in apples forums.
Customer Review: A gem that can be made even better
Summary: 5 Stars
I loved my iPod mini 2g for years, but this one is much better. Even with a clear case, it is tiny. The screen is small, but brilliant. I don't watch much video on it, but it makes choosing music and other operations much easier. The Nano 5g sounds better than the mini to begin with and can be made much better. Being tired of ear buds (My UE Super.fi 3's sounded good, but fell out of my ear every 45 seconds and finally broke) I bought a pair of folding Sennheiser PX100'sSennheiser PX 100 Collapsible Headphones. They sounded flat at first and I decided that the nano, for all its virtues didn't put out enough current to drive their large diaphragms. I added a FiiO E1 headphone amp FiiO E1 Portable Headphone Amplifier with Y-Cable (Black)which bypasses the power amp of the nano, gets its juice from the nano battery, and sends out enough current to make the Sennheisers sound great. In years past, I spend large amounts of money on big heavy components that didn't sound any better than this pocketable combination. Three cheers for the nano 5g which sounds pretty good out of the box with the stock earbuds (my wife uses hers that way with no complaints) and absolutely great with a few enhancements. P.S. The little video camera is a fun bonus even though the procedure for downloading the videos to a computer is a little awkward.