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New iPods Take Music to the Next Level
Armando Siahaan | October 12, 2009

From left, iPod Classic, iPod Nano and iPod Shuffle. (Photo courtesy of Apple) From left, iPod Classic, iPod Nano and iPod Shuffle. (Photo courtesy of Apple)
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Apple’s iPod is the king of digital music players in terms of style, innovation and sales — it defines cool, it uses the latest technology and it simply sells.

The iPod family is comprised of the iPod Classic, Nano, Shuffle and Touch. Their popularity is indisputable and E. Y. Yeo, Apple’s marketing manager for Asia Pacific, said more than 220 million iPods have been sold worldwide.

What makes Apple stand out in the market is that it offers the option of upgrading its gadgets on a regular basis, from something as simple as storage expansion, to a total makeover.

At the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Jakarta on Thursday, Apple introduced the latest incarnations of the iPod family.

Among the upgrades, the biggest change is with the iPod Nano’s latest edition. The Nano, according to Yeo, “is the most popular device in the iPod family,” with 100 million units sold worldwide since its release in 2005.

The newest Nano is the first in the iPod family to have a built-in video camera. This allows users to make their own home videos, either in portrait or landscape mode.

Nano users can also play around with the video features, as the camera includes 15 optional effects like classic movie-style sepia, mirror effect, or, for those who want to shoot a video styled from Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “Terminator” perspective, a cyborg effect.

Even with the camera addition, the revved up iPod Nano retains the petite size and lightness of its predecessor — it weighs in at 6.8 grams and is 91.4 millimeters high, 38.1 millimeters wide and 6.2 millimeters deep.

The newest Nano also comes with a larger screen. Where the previous model came with a five centimeter screen, this one has a 5.5 centimeter screen. Although only a slight expansion, it’s a useful one, especially for the video feature.

There are two options for the new Nano’s storage capacity — 8 gigabytes and 16 GB. With the 8GB option, one can store up to 2,000 songs, or 7,000 photos or eight hours of video. Keeping to its chic reputation, the device comes in a range of nine colors and is encased in glossy finish of polished anodized aluminum.

Another addition to the pocket-sized music player is the FM tuner, allowing the user to listen to stations like Hard Rock FM, Prambors, and Gen FM. The radio feature also includes Live Pause, which allows listeners to pause the radio for 15 minutes, say to pick up a phone, and then “continue exactly where [they] stopped,” Yeo said.

Thursday also saw the release of the newest iPod Shuffle. At 45.2 millimeters high, 17.5 millimeters wide and 7.8 millimeters deep, its the tiniest device in the family. According to Yeo it is also “the smallest music player in the world.”

It holds from 500 to 1,000 songs, depending on the storage capacity, and has a playback time of up to 10 hours.

The device also gets around one of the previous problems of using a shuffle — that listeners had no way of knowing what song they were listening to — with a Voice Over feature, which lets users simply press a button to hear the tiny gadget announce the song’s title and the artist’s name. The feature is available in 14 different languages, but Indonesian is not yet one of them.

However, unlike other iPod devices, the new Shuffle’s control buttons are located on the packaged earphones, which means users must own Apple-made earphones.

Apple also introduced the latest version of iTunes, the software that buys, organizes and plays music for the iPods.

A new feature, Genius Mixes for iTunes 9, allows users to select a song from which the device automatically creates a play list of similar songs. “It’s like having a personal DJ,” Yeo said.