Review: iPod nano 7th Generation

BluetoothMulti-touchNike+ Fitness built-inFM Radio built-inChoice of coloursNo cameraNo 3rd party appsNo clip Old-style earphones

Apple seems to completely reinvent its small, slim-line iPod nano with each iteration, and 2012 has been no exception.

The 2010 model, for example, (there were no new iPods in 2011) was square and had a clip, so you could wear it like an iPod shuffle. This latest 2012 version, launching alongside the iPod touch 5th Generation, has a completely different design again; it loses the clip and returns to your pocket.

This time around it looks more like a minaturised iPod touch, complete with a little Home button and multi-touch display.

This release also sees the return of video playback, a feature removed, and greatly missed from the last nano, but it hasn't regained its ability to shoot video, which the 2009 model was notable for.

The iPod nano now comes in nine different colours – white, grey, black, green, blue, purple, pink, yellow and Product Red.

It's got Apple's new Lightning connector, which replaces the rather large 30-pin Dock connector and as well as a Lightning to USB cable you also get Apple's new improved EarPods earphones in the box.

The new iPod nano runs apps, but it doesn't run a full-fat version of iOS, so you've only got a few basic Apple apps to play with – there's no App Store, and no iTunes Store either. So, what you're looking at here is Music, Videos, Fitness, Podcasts, Photos, Radio, Clock and Voice Memos. We'll go over them all in detail here, and see how they performed in our tests, so read on to find out more.

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Review: iPod touch 5th Generation

Better screenFive colour optionsiOS 6 improvementsVery thin and lightBetter earphonesApple Maps!Lightning port is a resetYou still need iTunes

In an age where your phone can hold all the music you own you may be wondering why you might still need an iPod touch 5th Generation.

The answer is that the iPod touch is not just an iPod anymore. While Apple still sells the old fashioned iPod Classic and has just rebooted with the iPod nano 7th Generation, the iPod touch has taken over as the champion of the iPod brand – it's essentially a media player par excellence that has morphed into a handheld gaming console thanks to the sheer number of excellent, and very cheap, games available via the App Store.

It's this gaming and app angle that really gives the touch its raison d'être. If you can't afford the premium tariffs that the iPhone attracts and you still want to take advantage of the thousands apps that Apple's App Store holds then the iPod touch is your cheapest route to entry.

The latest iPod touch 5th Generation takes the best features of the iPhone 5, like the taller 640x1136 pixel, 4-inch screen and the iOS 6 software update with Siri, and adds a few little quirks of its own, like a choice of coloured backs (black, grey, pink, yellow, blue and a sixth Product Red) and a new strap called an 'iPod touch loop'.

Along the way the camera has been upgraded to an iSight camera with a built-in flash that's capable of 1080p video recording and the processor has been upped to a duel-core A5 chip, giving it twice the processing power of the previous single-core A4 chip. Both the screen size and the faster processor are important for gaming, but more of that later.

Memory configurations have been simplified. The new 5th gen is available only in 32GB and 64GB flavours.

Finally, the new iPod touch runs iOS 6, the latest version of Apple's mobile operating system in all its glory, which means that both Panorama – a new mode for taking panoramic photos, and Siri, Apple's intelligent voice-activated personal assistant, are available here.

Note: neither of these two features work on a iPod touch 4th Generation running iOS 6.

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