It’s like a piece of time travel… my first generation 5GB iPod is getting hard to charge and put new music on, as its Firewire connector is dodgy – and the Firewire port on my PowerBook is broken which doesn’t help.
When 
the new 16GB iPod Nanos came out, I knew I had to have one: no moving parts and more than 3 times as much storage as my original brick. I know the Classic is better value per GB but I only have about 9GB of MP3s, so I figured the Nano would do.
I had feared that it wouldn’t work with my PowerBook – but hell it even works with my G4 iMac. V e r y s l o w l y. How I miss Firewire… an album would zip across that thick cable in seconds. It’s like missing Concorde – in the good old days it was all so much quicker.
All my music is on the big fat G4 iMac – which only has USB 1.0 – and so I ended up having to leave it running all night to transfer some 3000 songs. So imagine my amusement today when I started putting some videos on the Nano (MPEG Streamclip is the tool you need for making iPod-friendly videos, by the way), I pressed ‘Sync movies’ – I said movies – and it deleted all my music in a second. All gone. Hours of transfer work zapped. So I’m transferring it all again, and I can’t even play the addictive tilt-operated Maze game while it does it…
I got the new iPod Nano 4th Generation for christmas. It is the most aupaling apple product i have ever purchased. I was so exited to finally get a YELLOW iPod and now i might aswell chuck it in the bin. Having it only 3 weeks my Right head phone has broke and my charger doesnt work. I can’t charge it so my iPod is dead and i can’t transfer music to it :l. I haven’t put it in the washer or dropped it, or anything.
Pity. You should be able to get it replaced. I had to take mine back as it crashed every time I tried to reset the clock. The replacement has been fine though – I love it.
iPod nano is very good as a walkaround mp3 player. my only complaint is that the included headphones lack good bass. I replaced it with the Sennheiser CX-300 and the sound was awesome.