Jeremy Horwitz, on the new iPod nano:
More than most of Apple’s iPods—and certainly the majority of its iPod nanos—the sixth-generation iPod nano is a love it or hate it addition to the family, dropping so many of the capabilities of its predecessors that it’s hard to take seriously as a sequel. Haters will seize upon the omissions, the unchanged price tag, and the lack of true multi-touch functionality as reasons to pass on the nano, and we can’t say that we’d blame them; this would certainly be the first nano we’d have skipped, and as our limited recommendation suggests, we’d expect that most of our readers will do the same. There are enough of last year’s nanos floating around at lower prices to make this one extremely easy to forget; our editors all agreed that we would have felt differently if this was a $99 model; there’s just not enough here to justify these prices.
None of this is to say that the sixth-generation iPod nano is a bad product overall. The new form factor and touch screen represent one cool if not strictly necessary result of blending iPod shuffle and iPod touch DNA, and the result is surely not as ridiculously hard to use as last year’s iPod shuffle. Even if it turns off at least as many people as it ropes in, there will be some who embrace the new nano in spite of all it has lost—and don’t mind paying $149 or $179 for the privilege. Unlike the prior iPod shuffle, we wouldn’t actively urge them to save their money. The sixth-generation iPod nano may well wind up being a one-off design, like the third-generation “fat” nano, but like that model, the heart of this product’s a good one—it’s just the rough interface edges and limited feature set that need some additional work. Apple will have to decide going forward whether to shrink the nano further into the watch it could become, or enlarge it a little to regain the video features it has lost.