...eeeeehhhhhhh...

First off, I want to make it clear to every reader out there that I do not enjoy the iPod/iTunes experience. After a terrible fight with my iPod 20GB 4th gen (and it's millions of replacements, I'm not very confident that Apple can produce a player of true quality. However, Apple is certainly taking the right steps towards making their ever-popular iPod line better. Whereas I used to completely despise iPods and their shoddy make, not I'm just sort of ...eeeehhhhhhhh...

Improvements
Now, the iPod Nano 3rd Gen is definitely improvement over older iPods. First off, the screen is much larger, fitting more lines of text on the display. The screen is also good for viewing Cover Flow, "the scenic route through your music," as CNet Senior Editor Donald Bell describes it. It allows the user to browse the music buy cover art. Secondly, this iPod Nano supports video. Awesome.

...now come the catches. Don't expect to use your iPod to play any common video types. It can't play overly popular video codecs, such as .wmv or.avi. Instead, you can play .mp4 and .mov files, the Apple-based format. Unfortunately for everyone out there, .avi is most common of all video formats, making the iPod useless for watching videos unless you wants to transcode the files [converting them from one format to another], but BEWARE: Your video will suffer from loss in quality. Lossy to lossy transfers are never a good idea.

Also, while Cover Flow is a great feature, it's a little buggy. I ran into this scenario a lot:

I have Greatest Hits by Journey. I also have records called Greatest Hits by Queen and Bruce Springsteen. While browsing my albums in Cover Flow, the iPod will combine the tracks into one. This is really annoying, as I don't really want to go from Born to Run to Anyway You Want It.

Audio quality

Audio quality was...ho-hum and very okay. The good news is that it comes with volume boosting options and tons of EQ (Equalizer) settings with which to toy. However, for the $200 price tag, the sound quality should been much better. There was definitely something lacking, especially when turning up the music in my car. I rip all my CDs with Easy CD-DA Extractor or CDEx at V0/VBR, which is more or less the best setting for .mp3 encoding. I was disappointed by the player's basic sound quality, especially after the awesome quality of my iRiver and Creative players.

The iPod mainly supports .mp3 and .aac. While this...okay, as most people use .mp3 for ripping and downloading, it's a pain that they didn't include .wma and .flac file support. Other players, such as the iRiver and Sansa players support far more codecs.

Design and iTunes
No. No. NO. Apple just doesn't get it: we don't like iTunes. Get rid of it. It's slow, buggy, bloatware, and we don't want to have to install Quicktime to use it!

iTunes is one of the worst pieces of software I've ever used. Not only does it feel the need to change your ID3 Tags (making them unreadable by programs such as uTorrent), but it's CD-ripping encoder is lacking in comparison to the LAME Encoder, used in Foobar2000, CDEx, Exact Audio Copy, and Easy-CD DA Extractor. It's way too annoying for something that should be so simple. Not only that, but the iTunes Music Store has terrible sound quality!

Rather than using iTunes, I recommend going with Winamp or Floola.

Now onto design. The design of the iPod Nano 3Gen is okay. It's got its ups and downs. I like the larger screen. That thing is awesome. ...but I dislike the drastically smaller scroll wheel. I, personally, hate the scroll wheel in general, as I like tactile buttons much more, but if I have to use one, it should be much larger. Also, the Nano feels awkward to hold in the hand, as it has no thickness to its name. Sometimes thinner and smaller isn't always better.

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Overall, the new Nano gets a 2 star from me. Without being compared to other player, it gets a 3. It's still not the best in price, considering there are much better players that sound better out there. I recommend the Sansa e280, iRiver Clix, Creative Zen, Creative Zen V Plus, and Insignia Music Player and Image Viewer over the iPod. But if you do end up buying an iPod, please toss out the headphones and get yourself a decent pair. You are also making yourself a target for mugging and theft with them in.

P.S. If you are running Mac OS X Tiger, you will need to update your Mac to a higher version of Tiger and edition of iTunes to 7.2 for your Nano to work.

However I am pleased with it's improvements from the older iPods.

...at least it works.