In less than 15 minutes (10 a.m., San Francisco time), Apple Inc. will begin hosting a special media event that has “Let’s Rock” as its tagline. The “Let’s Rock” event has been heavily hyped since its announcement exactly one week ago. The tagline and the familiar silhouette that accompanies the invitation suggest an iPod related event. A refresh of the current lines of Shuffle, Nano, Classic and Touch had been expected and is inevitable since they have already shown their age. Except for Shuffle, I have had owned either previous or current models of all the other iPod lines. I currently own the following iPods:

I never saw the need of a Shuffle because even cell phones made couple of years ago could do a much better job than any Shuffles had been able to do. So I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple drops the Shuffle line completely.

I have owned 2 previous generations of the iPod Classic when they were still known as just the iPods.

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I still own a 5th generation iPod Classic that I take advantage of its 60GB capacity to store most of my iTunes music library. Its capacity is not big enough to backup my iTunes library of both videos and music though. It is attached to my car stereo most of the time. Until price of flash memory comes down significantly coupled with significant increase in capacity, I think there will still be demand for the iPod Classic. So I hope a new Classic with at least 250GB capacity will be released today.

Pictures purported to be that of a real Nano 4G started popping up all over the Internet last week. Those pictures conveniently confirm the drawings of the unconfirmed Nano 4G that had surfaced since July. The Nano line is the only iPod line that I have owned all the generations.

If those rumours of a vertical Nano with 16GB hold true, the Nano 4G will be the first of the Nano family that I won’t be interested to own. I want a Nano iPhone!

It has also been rumoured that the iPod Touch family will undergo some minor cosmetic changes that come without increased capacity beyond its present 32GB limit. With iPhone 3G availably widely at contract prices that are way below that of the iPod Touch, I doubt if a minor facelift and price cut would be enough to attract buyers.

 

jpowers55 left me a message on my “Apple 3rd Gen iPod Nano in Action” video at YouTube this morning about whether he could watch a 2-3 hour movie on an iPod Nano or whether it would be better to play it on something with a bigger screen. I cannot speak for him, but I certainly have watched many hours of TV shows and movies on my Nano.

My videos obviously have not convinced jpowers55 that Nano is a very “watchable” video player, so I took a picture with my iPod Touch placed above my iPod Nano, both paused at the same time frame of The 11th Hour (oops, I only just noticed that they are slightly out of sync with the Nano missing the lower third). Anyway, I figured to make it even more convincing, cause jpowers55 has obviously never seen a Nano playing videos in real, I needed to put the two iPods in context with something that jpowers55 can relate to. So I placed my Nokia N82 next to my iPod as a reference of their actual screen sizes.

I will let the readers to judge whether a Nano can be watched playing videos for hours. In my opinion, if one can stand texting and reading messages on a cellphone, watching movies on a Nano can actually be a treat to one’s eyes.

As to the question of whether it is better to watch movies on a player with bigger screen, the answer is obviously yes. It is always better to watch anything with a bigger screen. But choosing a portable multimedia player almost always involves trading off quality with portability. How much and what to trade off, however, cannot be generalized as it is up to one’s own personal preference to make that call. As for myself, I have settled to own two players of different size to complement each other.

 

More on my Flickr album

 

While shopping for accessories for my new Nano last Saturday night, I stumbled on a knockoff on the new Nano. The look of it is almost identical to the real one and it even got a pink one which looks almost identical to my red one. And it even comes with more choices of memory configurations than Apple offers. It has sizes of 1GB, 2GB, 4GB and 8GB.

Nano Knockoffs

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I think you will agree with me after watching my “in Action” videos below that the 3rd Gen Nano is the best ultra-portable entertainment device on the market now. It gives you hours of entertainment in the form of music, videos, photos and games in an unbelievably small package. Not only do the functions perform smoothly and flawlessly, their implementations are elegant and intuitive. But before getting on with the “in Action” videos, let’s see how the music video of Feist’s 1234 looks on my Nano:

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It was just before 15:30 when the courier delivered to me my personalized Apple 3rd Gen Red iPod Nano. What a way to kill a Saturday afternoon!

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Today marked the 1st anniversary of my relationship with my MacBook.

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