On Friday two weeks ago, Frank, Meghan, and I paid a visit to the Valley Fair Apple Store to see if the new iPod nanos had arrived. Just to, you know, look.

Because I am terminally lazy, I am simply going to shamelessly crib what I wrote elsewhere.

Important Safety Tip: Do not pick one of these up unless you are prepared to buy it. Once it is in your hand, you will not want to let it go. It’s like The One Ring of portable audio players. Touch its ensorcelled metal, and you instantly covet the Precious.

It’s not just that it’s small, although it is ridiculously so. Plenty of other portable players occupy roughly the same volume. But they don’t have the deceptively-simple perfection of proportion. The nano isn’t just compact: it’s a thin, flat slab that lies lightly on your fingers, with all the controls situated exactly under your thumb, in a way that strongly suggests that nothing else has any business being there again, ever.

Also, it’s not a stripped-down player with two buttons and possibly a small numeric monochrome LCD. It’s a full-bore iPod, with a bright, high-resolution color display, the full UI, and the scroll wheel that’s such an absolute delight to use.

I’ve been using technology long enough that I’d thought I’d gotten completely jaded about the notion that next year’s model will be half the size of last year’s, and do twice as much, but holding the nano, I feel like someone in Scheduling screwed up, and let the future arrive well before it was supposed to.

I almost feel sorry for everyone else making portable music players. It’s like a bunch of Shriners got together one fine Sunday morning to race their little go-carts, and some bastard pulled up to the starting line in a Ferrari. Doom.

Apple is going to be Hoovering up design awards for this one in the year to come the way I vacuum up spilled cat litter. They’re also, assuming they can meet consumer demand, going to want an extra shipment of leaf bags for all the cash they’ll be raking in. Apparently the black 4 GB model is so popular that Apple is already having to retool production to crank out enough of the things.

Having just acquired the full-bore iPod, I don’t really need one. But I find myself wanting one, or at least wanting to hold one, just to see if it’s as unbelievably small as it looks.

“The war is over. We lost.” So said Laura Roslin in the pilot for the new Battlestar Galactica, as she tried to convince Commander Adama that discretion was the better part of valor, or at least survival.

The same might be said of the digital audio wars. I have pretty much limitless respect for the folks at Xiphophorous; I think that Ogg Vorbis is a textbook example of how a media format should be designed and implemented for the public good. Unfortunately, a solid file format alone does not guarantee victory in the marketplace, and it’s pretty clear at this point that Apple, with the iPod and iTunes music store, has won dominance over the digital-music hill through a combination of first-class product design and spot-on execution.

Having grown increasingly frstrated with the design flaws of my trusty iHP-120, and seeing that at least one artist I care about is now releasing iTunes exclusives, I decided that the time had come to take the plunge. So I followed my friend Greg’s lead and picked up the current top-of-the-line, 60-gigabyte, color-display iPod.

My initial impression: “Wow, this thing is everything it’s cracked up to be.”

To elaborate a bit: the device’s superficial appearance is minimalist and elegant, but that’s the least of it. Clean, refined design goes all the way to the core of the thing, from the intuitive controls to the user interface — and that doesn’t even begin to touch upon its seamless integration with iTunes.

Pros:

• It powers up instantly. (Failure to do so was one of my biggest gripes about the iHP-120, which seemed to spend half a minute or so spinning up.)
• Music is organized intelligently and intuitively. (The iHP-120 hewed strictly to the organization of underlying filesystem.)
• The iPod doesn’t suffer amnesia every time it talks to the mothership, but remembers exactly where it was and what it was doing before it was plugged into a host computer. (The iHP-120 would revert to the same song after being detached.)
• The scrollwheel — more a scrollpad, really, since it uses a solid-state touch-sensitive surface — is the way every portable player should implement its interface. (Yes, I’m aware that Apple probably has the thing patented out the wazoo. That does, unfortunately, not change the facts. The iHP-120’s stubby little joystick got maddening after a while.)
• Apple’s designers devised the dock connector on the bottom of the iPod to handle everything: power, data, and a copy of the analog audio signal. Once upon a time I might have dinged them for using a proprietary connector instead of a series of standard ones, but that was before I grew tired of plugging multiple cables into different parts of the iHP-120 on a daily basis.
• The iPod is able to sense when something is plugged into, or unplugged from, the headphone jack. It starts up in the former instance, and pauses in the latter. (This almost seems like frippery until you consider that I ran the battery on the iHP-120 down more than once by unplugging it and then forgetting to stop it.)

Cons:

• iTunes, on Windows at least, seems to have some kind of seizure when you first plug the iPod into the USB port. It spends a few seconds thinking about something to the exclusion of all user input before proceeding with business as usual. Annoying, but tolerable.
• iTunes appears to want its affiliation with a given iPod to be exclusive. In other words, if you’re in the habit of plugging your iPod into machine A, you should always plug it into machine A — plug it into machine B and the first thing the latter will offer to do is wipe the iPod clean of your music and playlists. This wouldn’t be so irritating if Palm hadn’t solved this problem a decade ago, but again, it’s tolerable.

  To be honest, I haven’t investigated this aggressively — since I have a laptop now, and carry it with me everywhere, I’ve just made that the sync machine and don’t mind. I could see this getting on my nerves in a serious way, though, if I wanted to keep music collections synchronized between a work and home desktop.

Looking at the above list, it would seem that all of my complaints are with iTunes, rather than the iPod itself. Even that’s not really an accurate picture, since there’s more about iTunes to like than dislike. Its mechanics for assembling and managing playlists, for example, are everything WinAmp’s aren’t, despite Nullsoft’s having a half-decade head start in which to get it at least approximately right. You just drag and drop to your heart’s content, and never see a playlist you spent days carefully tweaking obliterated because you accidentally chose to “Play” rather than “Enqueue” some random file. I’d praise iTunes’ mechanism for syncing those playlists down to the iPod, but it almost feels like there’s nothing to praise: as with the music itself, it Just Happens.

And then there’s the iTunes Music Store. I think that this one gets counted as a “Pro”, but I won’t be sure until I have a chance to see how much damage I do the bank account with music purchases over the next few months. iTMS is simultaneously the most gratifying and terrifying e-commerce experience I’ve ever had in my life. Gratifying, because the interval between thinking “I’d like that song” and actually having it in your posession is measured in terms of a single mouse click and a matter of seconds. Terrifying, because the whole thing is so unbelievably streamlined that you could very easily lose sight of the fact that you’re spending real money every time you click “Buy”.