The new Apple iPod nano 5G with video camera: Hands-on photos

By Nate Lanxon on 09 September 2009, 10:18pm

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The new Apple iPod nano 5G with video camera: Hands-on photos Image 1

If you followed our live blog -- and really, you probably should've -- you'll know Apple has some new iPods. The most interesting of the bunch is the revised iPod nano, as it now has a video camera. And we just spent the last couple of hours playing with one so you don't have to.

Size-wise it hasn't changed, although the screen is slightly larger and the colourful chassis is glossier than before. It works just like the previous model, but you'll notice the main menu now has the option to fire up a camera and record video (you'll notice this more in one of our photos later on).

Clips are recorded at 640x480 pixels in H.264 MPEG-4, and with monaural audio that you can listen to through the new built-in speaker. There's no option to take still images though, which seems like quite a remarkable oversight. On-screen the recorded clips look great, but we'll save our final word on quality for tomorrow when we get one in the office to poke and abuse more thoroughly.

But it took just one button to start recording, another to stop -- simplicity derived from the likes of the Flip mini-camcorders, which Apple effectively named in its keynote as the inspiration for adding a camera to its MP3 players. Clips are then saved in folders organised by date of capture. You can browse these while listening to FM radio -- something we couldn't understand the nano not having before now -- or while counting how many steps you just took from the Apple store, since the player now has a pedometer for some reason.

So in many ways Apple's made this nano something of a jack of all trades, but kept the pricing reasonable -- £115 for the 8GB version, £135 for 16GB. We like the design a lot and love the video-recording option, and have no doubt it'll be a hit. But a couple of questions remain: why no option to capture still images? And also, no really, why no option to capture still images?!

Pick up the new nano in one of several glistening colours from right now on the Apple Web site, but check out our hands-on photos first.