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Ars Technica's iPod nano Dissection
starwindsurfer wrote to mention an Ars Technica review of the iPod nano in which they autopsy the cute little guy to find out what makes him tick. A more thorough review than the one we ran last week. From the article: "At this point we were astounded that the iPod nano was still working properly, albeit with a broken display. Because we had honestly expected the iPod nano to break by this time, we were forced to depart from our planned schedule of destruction and try and run over it with the car. Surely, we thought, it could never withstand the crushing power of German automotive engineering." Update: 09/12 14:58 GMT by Z : Changed linking words to previous article for clarity. Monday fuzziness.
Size of the iPod never really mattered to me, the 30 GB photo is small enough. What they should consentrate on is making it scratch proof, I can't stand so many scratches. Cases do not work so well, they still scratch and add lots of bulk.
What I don't understand is why, oh why hasn't apple incorporated an FM tuner into their iPod line yet?? Creative and iRiver have it on their models, it can't be that hard to implement. They are priced competitively as well so i can't be a cost issue.
Seriously, for me the downside of the Nano is the lack of FM tuner. Mp3's are great, but sometimes you just want to listen to radio.
I have been looking at getting an mp3 player for quite some time, and I thought the Nano was going to be my thing. But I will probably just wait until iRiver comes out with their clone with the FM tuner on it.
I got nothin'
Their choices for stress tests were less than ideal. I'm never going to drop my ipod out of a moving car. What would have been good was some tests that would tend to bend the ipod rather than just impact tests. Instead of just sitting on it, put it in the back pocket of some tight jeans and sit down. For that matter, putting it in the coin pocket of some tight jeans and sitting down seems like it would put some stress on it.
Nah, they're playing to a solid-state, no-moving-part gizmo's strengths. Hell, on my cheap mobile phone (Motorola V171) I once was troubleshooting what ended up being poor interface design (if the PIN is entered within the first 30 seconds of the "Enter PIN" message appearing, the thing would accept it, start up, wait 10 seconds, find no network, reboot and ask for the PIN again). I had gotten to the point in the troubleshooting tree that reads:
14) Throw phone out of Fifth-story window
Darn thing didn't even scratch.
I dunno about the nano, but if it's anything like similarly-shaped solid state consumer electronic devices, the weak spot is gonna be sustained torque. Take that thing, and put it in a vice to simulate supertight pants. Apply sustained forces for long periods and see if the case deforms, loosening a critical connection. Put it in one of those paint-shakers for a couple hours to simulate it being worn by a pogo-mad punkrockers.
Blunt trauma kills, but most of my devices die from "a long illness".
Because regular iPods support Firewire 800, which all Power Macs also support, and which trumps USB 2.0's bandwidth by a healthy margin.
riiiiight... because we all know that those leetle teeny hard drives are soooooo fast, much much faster than the data rate of a regular old firewire 400 connection.
music lover since 1969
Watch CPU usage too.
;-)
Oh, and move your mouse around while doing the transfer
Hope you don't have USB speakers attached as well.
USB is a shared medium, and has some pretty neat traffic handling, but its still shared. Firewire is designed to be a dedicated host-to-host high-bandwidth data transfer medium.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
As the Old Wise labrats say: if you want to reduce the reliability of something, add a connector, if it is still too reliable, add sockets.
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.