iPod nano

Well I recently received an 8GB iPod nano and am very impressed. I am upgrading from a 1GB nano which unfortunately has seen little use over the past year. That is primarily due to the fact that I typically listen to CD’s in the car and don’t listen to music when exercising, etc. In addition to the very stylish form factor, I am excited to play with the video playback options.

The iPod was easy to set up and merely required the download of iTunes 8.0. Then it was a matter of setting up the manual sync among other features. As it has an 8GB capacity and I only have a 4GB music library, I could go with an automatic sync as space is not longer an issue. Video playback sucks up about 1GB/hour of programming so I have to be a little more careful about how much is loaded. Of course with the 3 hour battery life for video, space is again a non-issue.

As my wife has got me hooked on TiVo, I started porting over some programming with TiVo to go. The player would not recognize .asf files or certain mpeg-4 files that I had saved previously. The quality of the picture and sound was adequate and I look forward to improving my understanding of video file formats and playback. I have been partial to the Creative Zen, but the iPod was a gift and my favorite electronics are free electronics.

The largest drawback to TiVo to go is that it is slow. Downloading from iTunes is 15 minutes with a good connection. Transferring from Tivo is 90 minutes for 60 minutes of programming. Converting for iPod is another 30 minutes for 60 minutes of programming. For my purposes this is not too bad as I will start the transfer before going to bed and then the convert when I leave for work. For a daily commuter who depends on portable entertainment, it could lose its charm quickly.