New iPods

I've been thinking about buying a new iPod Nano. I've had mine for two years, and its been a little flaky lately. I had to do a restore on it, losing some workout data. It froze up on me, and I had to do a soft reset. It's had some unexplainable loss of battery, where it suddenly only got an hour of play off a full charge (it then got four hours of play on a subsequent full charge.) I knew Apple was planning on new iPods though, so there was no point in buying one until the new ones rolled out. That day was today.

Thew new Nano is interesting. It's cool that it can play video. The pricing is nice, with 8GB for $200 (my 1st gen Nano was $250 for 4GB.) However, it is not backwards compatible! What do I mean? Well it looks like it would still work with my Nike+iPod kit. That is good. The new form factor will definitely not work with my existing Marware armband. A protective armbad is essential for anybody who uses their Nano to work out. So that is bad. Right now the only armbands are the weak one from Apple. These are not sweat-proof. So maybe I'll buy a new Nano, but only Marware (or somebody) has a protective armband.

But wait, there's more. There was a new iPod, now dubbed the Classic. You gotta love a 160GB iPod.

The big news is obviously the iPod Touch. Apple took the iPhone and ripped out the phone part. Perfect! Perfect! Perfect! For $100 more than the Nano, you get a bigger screen with Wi-Fi and Safari. Ok, so it's not quite the iPhone sans AT&T. Looks like it is missing some of the iPhone's widgets, namely email. Email sucks on the iPhone when compared to my Blackberry anyways. Now somebody just needs to get Skype on the iPod Touch and Apple's conversion to the dark side will be complete.

As for me, I don't think the iPod Touch would be useful for running. I don't think I'd be able to use the Nike+ thing, and I've heard the iPhone's headphones jack is weird. So my Sennheiser sweat-and-wind proof headphones might not work either. That's how Apple rolls.