I have an iPod Nano
But it's everything but a walk in the park. To be frank, I'm a bit disappointed. You see, it keeps freezing on me. It first started happening just shortly after I got it. It always happened when I had just selected a track or podcast to play, and the menu was just starting to shift over to the player view out of the list view. The scroll-bar would start to move, and stop a centimetre from the right side of the screen. And after that, no response. The built-in speaker would still emit scrolling sounds for a few moments, but then fall silent. Since the Nano has no power button, my sole choice in the matter was to let it drain its battery out. Since this was in the evening, I just left it on the table and waited till morning. In the morning, I tried plugging it to the computer. And lo, it was accessible. After a bit of a charge-up, it was acting as nothing had happened. It's as if it just freezes sometimes, goes into an eternal programming loop, and has to be restarted to work.
This has happened 4 or 5 times since, in these 2 months I've had the device, the last instance being today. I was thinking about the song "Göng" from the most recent Sigur Rós album, "Takk...". Pretty soon I had it bouncing around my head uncontrollably, and since I have the album on my iPod, I just had to put it on (I'm at the university, so I can't just put the album in the CD player). When I did, I knew I'd have to turn the volume down, since I always listen to podcasts at the highest volume, due to the nature of spoken word. So, as soon as I pressed on the song in the song list, I started to slide my finger along the scroll wheel, in a counter-clockwise direction. The volume bar came on screen, and then - nothing. It had frozen again. It's sitting in my pocket right now, back-lit screen ablaze, draining its battery away. I'm guessing I won't be able to use it until late in the afternoon.
It seems that the Nano can't handle too much input. It also can't handle some type of sound files (be it AAC or MP3, either at various bit rates). The first time it froze I was playing an Autechre song I'd just ripped to the computer with iTunes, in AAC format. The later instances I was playing a podcast, usually an MP3 in 24-92kbps format. The last time I was playing an AAC and giving instructions to lower volume while the song was loading.
Is this really normal? Is iPod supposed to be so fragile in usage? Do I have to give it a time to process before inputting additional commands?
These are the questions I intend to ask those dudes at Apple IMC, Iceland.