Great choice if you're not fussy for features

This is my first Ipod so I have no previous Ipods to compare it against. However, it is not my first mp3 player and I think it is light years better than any of the mp3 players I've ever had.

I badly wanted a new lager capacity mp3 player and couldn't decide on either the 30GB Ipod Video or this one, in the end I settled for this as judging by the state of my mobile phone (always dropping it), I think I'd be safer with the flash-memory based Nano.

The Nano 8GB is all metal and when I bought it, it came with a whole lot of extra free stuff like a screen protector, arm band, a quick travel charger and a soft casing which slips onto the Nano live a perfectly fitting glove.

I have so far filled it up to about 2 GB of songs and I have more stuff to put onto it. I also like the fact that I can easily plug it into any new PC and use it like a removeable storage drive.

The display light is really bright and this makes viewing it easy in bright conditions but I think it also sucks up a lot of juice. I have the light turned off and only turn it on if I use it in totally dark conditions. I wish Apple had put in an option to dim the light, such as power saving - medium - full brightness.

I also really LOVE the search feature. You can search through your gigabytes worth of music just by entering a word or letters and the Ipod will display a whole list of songs that has that word in its name or ID tags. Very very useful and it really makes locating a particular song real easy. This is real handy when you have several hundred or thousands of songs or sound clips stored on it

You will have to download Itunes yourself as no disc is included.

The included earphones are white in color and kinda clashes with the all metal and sleek black Nano. But my biggest gripe is just how useless these earphones are. They are the reason why I bump down the sound rating down to "just okay." You will most likely want to get a better pair as the included pair outputs very weak bass and sometimes distorts at louder volume. I like Sony's earphones as the bass boost is really good but they are a big larger for my ears to fit comfortably.

The battery life is also EXCELLENT! I have been playing it for a long time now that I don't even remember but the battery is still going real strong. With the quick charger, I am able to get a full chrage in about two hours. Using the USB cable takes much longer.

I am not sure if when turned off the Ipod is really off or just in sleep mode because its start up time is almost instantaneous. I would like an option to actually turn it completely off to conserve battery power when not used for a long time.

The Nano does not have an integrated FM radio but that's not a problem as I very rarely ever listened to the FM radio on my older mp3 players anyway. Besides, when you've got so much music on one device, would you be listening to the radio playing random songs?
The tranfer rate is noticeably slower than my other USB 2.0 devices but still bearable and much faster than USB1.1 devices. I was able to tranfser a 2GB folder in about 8 minutes. I can do the same on my USB drive in about 3-4 minutes.

All in all, I like this Ipod a lot, I just wish the earphones had more bass (the midrange and highs sound okay).

I would highly recommend this to anyone who don't plan to watch videos on tiny screens and who are prone to accidentally drop (or likely to drop at least two or three times) their mp3 players.

I give this Nano a 4 star value rating only as I think it could have been cheaper so as to be a better value compared to the larger Video Ipod. But then again, both will cater to different needs.