Thoughts on the G3 iPod Nano

in my earlier post, I said I hadn't tried out the iPod Nano yet.  Well now I have, and have some thoughts.  As usual, I'm going to say this is my opinion and you should take it as such.  I also am going to not get into any big flame wars on this - if you disagree, please post respectfully.

I think they made a strange tradeoff.  I think that for most people, the Nano has always been about music.  If you were one of the (few) users who really cared about video, you obviously went elsewhere.  Now, they've added video to the device.  This is a nice adder, but IMHO not all that compelling given the (still) small screen size.  But fine, it's got video.

The tradeoff is in designing the device around this scenario.  The "fatty" formfactor feels like a worse music device than the G2 iPod Nano in several ways:

• the scrollwheel is really small.  to fit it into the little space beneath the screen, it shrank.  this makes is quite a bit easier to miss the active surface while "wheeling".
• It is less of a one-handed device.  I could hold the tallboy Nano and use my thumb.  this one really wants one hand holding it while the other one scrolls.  This is hard to describe, so go try one and see.

Don't get me wrong - it's a beautiful little device.   But I think (hope?) there's an opening for us.  The Zune 4 and 8 are the more music-focused formfactor, but still enable video in landscape mode by turning the device. 

Remember when apple end-of-lifed the ipod mini, there was a groundswell of folks who missed it?  It didn't matter because there was no reasonable alternative.  I'd like to think this time there is one.