We recently lamented the demise of the fourth-gen iPod and the iPod mini. The former offered decent battery life at the expense of a mono screen while the latter offered decent battery life in a convenient form factor. Both vanished to be replaced by colour versions, rife with gimmicks and dire battery life.

That’s all changed. Our seventh-gen, 80GB test iPod played shuffled MP3s for 21.5 hours (one-and-a-half more than advertised) and video for more than six hours (as advertised). The new nano didn’t stop playing music for 26 hours (two more than advertised). All very respectable. We’ve seen more from Sony and iRiver in the past – but from flawed players. Just note that searching and skipping tracks will decrease these figures.

The 80GB iPod is only slightly thicker than the last generation’s 30GB version at 14mm, while the new 30GB version is almost one-third thinner than that at 11mm. Both retain the flat-topped styling that appeared with the sixth-gen and are available in white or black. The screen is a bit brighter than before but it’s otherwise the same.

At 80GB it’s useful as a portable storage device and so we tested it as such. It transferred 100MB of large files at 8.8 MB/s and 100MB of small files at 3.5MB/s. The average seek time was 19.8ms and it managed a sustained transfer rate of 16.2MB/s. It’s all below average in the world of external hard disks but easily made up for by the highly-portable size. iTunes transferred 1GB of music in two minutes 19 seconds (7.3MB/s) – very fast for tagged MP3 syncing.
We raved about the first nano back in November 2005. All we could fault was the 14-hour battery life. The new nano is a similar size but revives the design of the well-missed iPod Mini with its colourful styling and rounded sides. It looks absolutely fantastic, weighs nothing (well, 40g) and feels bomb proof. The 4GB version is available in silver, green, pink and blue. The 2GB version comes in silver and a new 8GB version comes in black. We did note paint scratches after a couple of weeks though. All still use flash memory making them ideal for sports-like activities – there’s no hard disk to bump around and damage. Note, none support video. Transferring songs is quick for flash – 1GB took four minutes through iTunes (4.1MB/s) but it’s the 12-hour improvement in battery-life that’s the leading achievement.

Functionally, there’s little different with this generation: they’re simple to operate and sound great. Another boon is the free engraving you get when buying via Apple’s online store.

With so much going for them many won’t understand why we warn against them, but there are valid reasons. The most important is the lack of WMA support. Most computer owners who encode music will use Windows Media Player’s default settings to do so and, as such, have their music in WMA format. The iPods and iTunes do not support this. While iTunes will transcode the music, this significantly reduces audio quality.

Also note that although Apple continues to wax lyrical about the photo, video and game capabilities of its iPods, adding photos involves a lengthy transcoding process and who do you know that regularly looks at the results? Video content is a concern as well.

With iTunes 7, Apple is really shouting about the improved video content. More TV shows and films are available than ever before – great for long, public-transport commutes. Unfortunately, none of it is available outside the US. In Australia video content is still limited to music videos and Pixar animations. We asked Apple Australia why we had such a dearth of content but it ‘didn’t see the problem’ and we wondered, ‘who wouldn’t want to watch music videos and Pixar clips on their iPod?’ As for the games: we fear iPod wheels just aren’t suited.

While the iTunes music store catalogue is ever growing, we recommend you don’t buy any of it – it’s low quality compared to CDs and DRM restrictions mean you can’t do what you want with your ‘purchases’. Increased audiobook and podcast availability is attractive though and it’s good at organising your (compatible) songs. New optimisation for gapless playback is also praiseworthy and iPod synchronisation is still a breeze. Having almost a quarter of the screen taken up by music store adverts is annoying though.

Bundled accessories are very poor: you get decent earbuds, a USB sync/charging cable and an accessory docking adaptor. A protective sleeve comes with the seventh-gen models but crucially you have to download iTunes from Apple’s site. At 35MB, people with dialup connections will suffer.

If you’re happy to buy into iPod, these are all great (and great-value) players. However, the music and video format support is still superior on Creative’s Vision:M (see A-List) and this will be more useful to many PC users. But if you’ve wanted an iPod for a while, these models are a great improvement.