Category: Geeks r Us
As a common english phrase says, so it grows. Or is it so it goes?
Apple's own steve Jobs was present at the september 9th apple event - where the company often unvails new products and functionality. It is, quite literarly, Christmas time for Apple fans - since most iPod models get an upgrade every year. Last year, we saw the unvailing of the iPod classic, and the Nano 4th generation which revolutionized both the sighted and disabled markets.
For the sighted market, the apple nano 4th generation brought back the familiar, "chewing gum" shape to the popular iPod family. It also used a fine aluminum casing - something which made your iPod virtually scratch resistant.
For the disabled market, this was the first time the Cupertino-based corporation began working on accessibility, specifically targetting the blind and low vision markets. We saw, for the first time, the addition of a feature called "spoken menus" which made your iPod so much friendlier. I had my Ipod nano 4th gen, until I decided to be generous and sent it off to my girlfriend. Of course, so it goes: We broke up 4 months later.
But this year is different. I won't be sending my iPod to anyone, and that's because I have found probably the ultimate iPod model. I know, you will be saying: "yeah yeah yea, that's what they all say. Next year some nnew technology will come out and it'll make the iPod better!".
But honestly? Do I really need tuse zune-like features such as wi-fi music sharing? no. Do I need a built-in tape player in the iPod? no. All of that is very... superfluous.
So a year has gone by since we last saw an apple show. In that year, the company has released the iPhone 3gs - an update which included a feature called voice over, allowing, again, voice accessibility for the blind. (hey, why can't the iPod support hearing aid compliance too?)
We saw the iPhone rise in popularity in the VI market as a result.
Well, this event also brought growth and progress to the company. Let's take a look.
1. The iTouch also got the iPhone 3gs update - meaning that the new iTouch generations have voice over built in. Aside that, the capacity range of the device is now up to 64 GB for $400. Neat, eh?
2. Itunes 9 was released. While most sighted describe iTunes 9 as still having the same unorganized washed up interface, it does function much better with assistive technology than before. (tested with JAWS, Window-eyes, and Zoomtext) The new iTunes will actually read your iPod's information, such as capacity and free space, when tabbing around the window.
3. The iPod classics are now at the 7th generation.
and 4. The new iPod nano 5th generation was revealed.
While I could focus on voice over in the iTouch (a feature I'm dying to see myself), today I will instead look at this new nano. Again, a year - where are we?
The new iPod nano 5th gen: smoother than ever!
I received my Amazon shipment for the nano today. I figured, it's my birthday soon, why not buy one - finally becoming 18 and all.
The packaging of the nano has not changed much - besides the iPod being secured by a backing into the packaging, you still get the stick shaped box which is 8 times as thick as the Nano itself.
The iPod itself has a great grip. Not only this, the aluminum casing just got even more polished and smoother - and it does get cold if you leave your iPod out at room temperature for a while, so yes, it is very fine aluminum. In fact, it is probably the same material Apple uses on the Macbook pro series of laptops.
Scrolling through the menu with my sister, I was at first shocked to see no "spoken menus" option in the settings/general menu. So, out of panic, I went and installed iTunes 9.
To my relief, two options are now present in the "other options" group of iTunes:
Enable voiceover,
and enable spoken menus.
wNo matter hichever option you choose, you will have to download a 20 meg "voiceover toolkit" which is installed on your computer and has apple's own propriotary voices (featuring over 20 languages). Once that is done, your iPod will be synced with the default, robotic English voice - the one present in the iPhone today. It's not the worse voice, but not the best either.
Once you have set up spoken menus, you can check a box called "use system default voice", which will use the sapi5 compatible voice you choose in speech (in windows 2000/xp) or Text to speech (In windows Vista/7).
Spoken menus, however, hasn't changed. You still have no verbal feedback in the alarms, screen lock, and other extra features - a disappointment in my opinion.
FM Radio: Now in the box!
Thhe new nano is smaller in size, but not smaller in functionality. While the device retains it's stick shape, it has shrunk a half an inch in width - but we now have an FM radio built in.
The radio itself is very easy to use, and spoken menus does have support for selecting your region and entering into the radio itself. Once you start the radio, you use the scroll wheel to move between frequencies manually. Alternatively, you can hit enter and slide your finger over the wheel to do an automatic tuning.
What's confusing is the lack of spoken menus support - nothing is announced when you hit enter, so if you have entered the tuning mode, you know not. Once you have found the station, hit enter agian to change your volume, and enter again to return to the frequency-based selecting mode.
The radio also features something called Live pause. The iPod will cache 15 minutes of radio audio, so if you're busy and want to pause the radio for a few minutes, you can - the iPod will resume where you left the song off. You can also rewind the radio - by simply holding the left wheel down just as you would rewind a song. This is, by far, one of the most comprehensive and useful iPod features.
Pedometer/fitness:
So we have an accelerometer in the nano - which can automatically switch your device into coverflow mode when flipped. Why not put it to more use?
Well, now you can: The new nano features a pedometer which uses this accelerometer to track your steps. You can connect your iPod to your computer and iTunes will even upload stats to the nike website. This is very nice, only if it had spoken menu support, which it doesn't. If you have it, play the wop-wop sound here.
Builtin speakers!: yay!
Yep. We saw it on the ipod Touch last year. Now we are seeing it again. The nano has a built-in speaker now, which is located just on the end of the device. Although it is tiny, the song quality it delivers is not too bad, provided that you not use it to headbang to your favorite rock song. It is a cheap way to listen to your music - instead of having to pass your headphones around into ears which you don't know when were cleaned. The builtin speaker is very bad sounding on loud tracks - but for an audio book, it's perfect!
Oh, and by the way, you can't listen to your radio with the speakers built in. The iPod needs a headphone to use as it's radio antenna. Sorry...
By the way, the difference between voiceover and spoken menus:
"enable voiceover" will not speak your menus, but instead allows a person to hear the song which is playing. It's handy for those who can see the screen but are let's say, driving and don't want to see what song is playing and it's title.
Overall:
This is the perfect iPod model for me. I have always wanted a radio on the iPod - and now we have it! Carrying an iPod radio would of been too bulky for me. But now I have it built-in, and can listen to my favorite rock station while riding the bus. Great work, apple. You've become even more... delicious to take another byte out of. And I'm sure many will - the nano's prices are cheap. Sort of. the 8 GB model is $150 while the 16 GB one is $180. I heard there is a 32 GB one coming on the block, but it's not on any shopping site yet - so I won't comment on that.
-Tamas Geczy
September 15, 2009
Very good, as always Tomi. I love reading your reviews here. You should hvae a site where you post these besides here. If I didn't have my iphone, I might look at these.
Sounds great! But the best news of all, I'm not tempted!
I have my Booksense and I'm a happy girl!
Sounds fairly cool.
Although the praise seems a little too much given the significant faults you find e.g. with the menus. Apple has done a good job generally, but I'd really want to see wi fi shring as well as support for flac, ogg and wma formats *may be suppot is there for ogg and flac, I don't know(, better functioning spoken menus and, most importantly of all, Apple allowing peple to work the IPod without having to import everything into ITunes.
But, still thanks for excellent reviews on this site, but on the IPod and Windows, not agreeing to all of the points creates discussion, which is for the good, and having someone review these things is just really cool.
If you get IPod Touch and review it, it'd be fantastic.
On the flip side, I just got the new iPod Touch, and it is the first fully accessible iPod yet. Did I mention it's fully accessible?
Nice. Not tempted either. Had such a crappy tio withthe Gen4... So, not wanting to invest in another half-assed accessible machine.
One thing I'll give Apple huge props for is their customer support, replied to my email with inquiries in less than 3 hours, try that with GW Micro or FS, I have, 3 weeks if you're lucky.
Basically, VoiceOver does not support braille devices on the IPhone or Touch yet, but they say it's apriority for future release. They didnot directly answer my question regarding Bluetooth accessibility so I am still not sure if an external bluetooth keyboard can be used, and, well, Icelandic can not be installed on the device unless we work with their packaging manager, but that is a different story. I am infinitely more interested in an IPod Touch than the Nano.
I love my new iPod Touch! Picture an accessible music player, calculator, notepad, clock with alarms, timers, and stopwatch, web browser, email client, and lots more in a device that fits almost in your wallet, and you have the new Touch. No blind-specific device has been made with this many features, and with this much accessibility out of the box. The one drawback is that you pretty much have to not mind there being no buttons except the one Home button. Everything else is done on the glass.
well, the nano also has a videocamera, which I forgot to mention - it's video is about as good as on a phone. Although the sound quality is great!
Yeah, the only thing I am kinda scared on the touch about is the "knowing where to touch" thing, I know it tells you what you are on when you put your hand on it but I'd find it time consuming to touch every particle of the screen to know what item I want to find. I have not looked at extensively, though, so I'm not really clear on how touching works on it for the blind - can someone explain that?
-Tomi
You don't have to use itunes, their are other programs that can sync your ipod. Itunes is just the more widely-used and most known about though.
Everything remains in the same place on the Touch. For instance, just below the status area are generally the buttons to go back to the previous level, the save button, and anything else of that nature. With lists, simply scroll with your fingers, using gestures for those purposes. If you land on something, you can double-tap it, or you can hold one finger on what you want to press, and tap it with another finger. I thought it would be tough, but I learned it in about 30 minutes.
Anyone know if the Zune HD is accessable like the iPod Touch. The touch does seem temptiing i must say,
The Zune is not accessible in the least. Sorry.
yep... I guess one more reason to switch from Microsoft. Personally I think they lost the battle, no matter how good the ZUNE HD is.
They've sure lost the battle where accessibility is concerned, and are letting screen readers add more and more bloat to themselves. Voiceover, on the other hand, is quick and responsive, both on Macs, and on portable products.
Yeah, you don't here much about the Zune, anyway. And its had bunches of problems, I have read.
I used to have the first generation Zune back when it was released - I actually wrote a review of that as well. You know, I gotta give it to MS: You get sample songs and pictures with the Zune which you would normally not get with an iPod. As far as Menus, I memorised each menu point.
As for voiceover, it's a great product! I wouldn't recommend it for high internet surfing since You have to hold down the vo keys (you can lock them) and always need to interact with an item to access it - you can't just move through it to see it's contents. while you can lock the VO keys in for navigation you still need to interact with a table etc.
Actually, that has all changed in Voiceover 3.0. There's a mode called Quicknav, where you don't have to lock the vo keys or interact with anything. It's more like surfing the net in Windows, but much better in some ways. Also, you can use the trackpad commander, and surf the net like you would on your iPhone.
yeah the zune pass was the real reason i was interested in the zune. $15 a month you can load up your player with everything in the store and you get to pick 10 tracks a month to keep pernamently. not a bad deal atall.
This is true, and Apple has no such subscription plan. However, give them time, and I bet they will if it does well for Microsoft.