Tag Archives: iPod nano 5g

OH my god.  Went to the company picnic (what fun that was… NOT), had BBQ, watched people drink and become more stupider (yes, I know it is incredibly bad grammar) and got massively rained on (Yeah rain).  On the plus side on the rain… we got a lot, but just north of us got 12 inches in 17 hours… not pretty

ANY way…

Like the Christmas party, they have door prizes.  I’ve been to several of the picnics and several of the Christmas Parties and I’ve never gotten anything but the cutesy little things that they give everyone at the Christmas part for showing up.

Yesterday was the exception to the rule.  Yesterday my name was drawn and I got to go pick from whatever was left.  The really really cool stuff was gone… like the TV and the computer and the WII and all of the gift cards, but the iPod nano was still there and so was the movie camera.  The movie camera might have been nicer, I’m not sure.  But I got a nano.  And the chick from HR said that, they talked to the Apple store (and they still had the receipt for buying it) and anyone who got the Apple stuff (there were a couple shuffles, and a couple nanos) could take them into the Apple store and exchange them, since the boxes were still sealed, for the newer model.  The nano that was there was a silver 4G.

I heard all of the hoopla on the iPod nano 5G that Apple put out just this week (hey, I am a geek) and thought it sounded interesting… not something I would actually be able to justify spending money on any time soon, but interesting… So, I snagged up the nano.

The picnic was just about 3 miles from the mall where one of the two local Apple stores are here so after the picnic I high tailed it to the mall (first time I’d ever driven there all alone) and went to the Apple store and exchanged the 4G for a shiny Pink 16 gig 5G.

I have a new toy!

I was actually counting on running this morning with it so I could try it out, but it is raining too hard this morning to use it without some kind of protection on it to keep it semi dry… and I can’t complain, as long as we don’t get the kind of rain they got to floody floody the towns and the highway yesterday, we desperately need the rain.

So… I will have to put off seeing what I can capture in my travels until another day.

I did do some digging, last night after I got home, to see what exactly the deal is with the new toy.

It has a pedometer… one that apparently you can sort of synch with Nike’s running site.  That is a toy I will have to work at playing with.  Something that automagically uploads data so I can track it better is a good thing.  Interesting thing on the pedometer, it wants you to put in your weight and it calculates how many calories you are burning as you walk.  A plus from a geek who is working to get more fit perspective.  The pedometer keeps track of your history, too.  Getting to it and viewing it is a little quirky but it is neat.  It also allows you to set goals for numbers of steps, and has either always on mode or manual turn it on when you are exercising mode.

The video camera (which is video, not stills, but I think I can probably find software that can dink around with that…  B-) … ) records pretty well all in all.  It isn’t like having a ‘real’ video camera that takes full screen sized movies… these ones are about the size of the videos you see on youtube’s sscreen, but the quality is good and the ‘camera’ weighs as much as… well… an iPod nano… so it won’t weigh you down during a run (or a race) and the 16 gig will probably record a pretty decent amount of movie.

— there are 2 drawbacks here, though.

1. Most important to know… you can’t listen to anything at the same time you are taking movies.  As soon as the video camera utility opens, the music shuts off.  I was actually counting on it staying on so I could run to the music while taping at least parts of my run.  Not going to happen.  Will have to rely on backup music for that… but the light weight feel of the nano means that adding in another very light weight MP3 player won’t interfere much with my running even in races.
2. There are currently not any cases (at least not that I saw) that will attach this to you and let the camera viewer be what is on the outside.  This means that I’m going to have to get creative and make my own that I can wear with either camera out or screen and controller out or carry the camera in my hand.  I’m pretty sure I will be working on the creative getting side and make something that I can wear either on my arm facing forward or pinned to my chest facing forward or on a lanyard.  I expect all kinds of new cases will come out eventually… some that will take this into account.  There are actually some cases available (none at the iPod store yesterday though) that have little opening for the camera and mic as well as for the front of the iPod… I found one on the internet that is a silicon skin that I think I’m going to buy (it is cheap and it will help keep it dry and I can figure out how to hook it to something or build something around it…

It has a built in voice recorder that I haven’t tried out yet (on my to do list for today) which will be great for recording myself thinking while running.  Again… it is light weight and small and if I tried to use all of my electronics during training I would actually weigh 10 pounds more… so even if I don’t use this one for music at the same time as other things, I can use if for the other things…

It has some neat new games, multiple world wide clocks that you can set up (it defaults to California… duh) but you can edit that one (to get it to take the new place, you have to push the round middle button and the “got to the right” button at the same time) and add others.  There are alarms you can set, multiple calendars and a stop watch.

The on screen graphics for each thing are… interesting.  For me, having a microphone picture on the voice recorder or a shutter opening on the video recorder doesn’t add a lot to the experience but it is neat and I know that it wasn’t designed really with people like me in mind, more for people like my kid…

It is actually a rather utilitarian little gadget.

Now… to put it through its paces…