myPod Nano Update: The iPOS

So, yesterday morning, on my way to work, I try to play some tunes through the FM transmitter in my car, only to discover that all my settings and music have been wiped clean. This is actually the second time this has happened to me. Only the first time it was even worse, as the iPod wouldn't even boot. When I did get it to boot, all the shit was gone. It's pretty minor annoyance when I'm 3 miles away from home, where I can restore the iPod and transfer all the music back, but it would really suck if this happened when I was on some out-of-town trip. That would make me really pissed at Apple. Though, I do wonder whether some if not most of my iPod problems are due to the fact that I have a Linux boot partition on the thing. Well, I had a Linux boot partition on it. Before I restored the iPod yesterday, I wiped it clean using and HP low level formatter for USB drives. After that, I restored only the original iPod OS. So, we shall see if ditching Linux will prevent anything like I described from happening again. If not, the iPOS moniker will stick.

myPod Nano

I bought a 4 GB Nano a while back. Even though I despise the whole pod culture and Apple fanboiz, there simply wasn't another quality 4GB flash MP3 player on the market at that time. I needed something small, relatively high capacity and without moving parts, so the Nano fit the bill. I thought that it was worth $250, especially after I found out that I can install Linux on it and play Tetris. :)

Any way, you can't help but to be impressed by the packaging and presentation of this player, but it's still far from a perfect product.

The battery life is shit and you won't be able to enjoy its attractive looks and glossy finish for long, as you HAVE to put it in some kind of a case or skin, that is unless you want it all scratched and smudged after a week of use. The skin that I bought does a great job of protecting, but attracts dust like a Hoover.

The player is also fairly glitchy. Well, not as glitchy as my old Rio player, but close. The most annoying issue I have encountered is parts of my song library getting corrupted. I would listen to a song and all of the sudden, it would get interrupted by another song, from a different album. Stuff like that...

The click wheel is really not a big deal to me. I found my old Rio player to be just as easy to control with its standard "d-pad" thingie. In fact, sometimes I overshoot with the click wheel and end up turning the volume up too high or something and think that digital controls would be better.

iLinux was fun to mess around with, for about a week. It was cool to show iDoom to people. I still play Tetris and watch music videos on it from time to time.

Overall, I'm satisfied with my purchase.