Tiny iPod nano has makings of a big hit

For over a year, we've been waiting for Apple Computer Inc. and Motorola Inc. to introduce their combination cellphone and personal music player. Last week, I got my hands on one. I can confirm that it is indeed a phone and it does indeed play music. That's about all I can remember.

But I have no trouble recalling the astonishment of opening another box from Apple, this one containing a device so slender and light that at first you think some portion of it must be missing. But no; you rattle the box, peer inside. There's no mistake. This sliver of a thing is the latest iPod music player, the nano.

Even its name is tiny -- Apple decided to dispense with capital letters. And of course, the name hints at the up-and-coming science of the ultra-small.

Still, Apple may have been a tad too clever with the nomenclature. It seems that Creative Technology Ltd. of Singapore has been selling a music player called Nano since March. That's Nano, with a capital N. Perhaps that slight difference will matter to a trademark judge somewhere.

Apple's already in trouble with Creative, which last month won a US patent on a user interface technology similar to the one used by the iPod. Another feature of the iPod interface has also been patented -- by Microsoft Corp. Believe it or not, Apple chief executive Steve Jobs might end up owing royalties to Microsoft chairman Bill Gates.

This could get expensive. But Apple's raking in cash from its iPod line -- more than $1 billion in sales last quarter alone. Now the company plans to keep the run going by making the smallest iPod yet. The nano has been stripped, shrunken, compressed in every practical way. The goal, said Stan Ng, Apple's director of iPod product marketing, was ''making it as thin and small and unconsciously portable as we could." Indeed, it's a good thing you have to plug in headphones. If it weren't for the wire, you could lose the nano in a shirt pocket.

The nano is Apple's replacement for the most popular of iPods, the Mini, which relied on a small hard drive for data storage. Hard drives drain batteries faster and are prone to damage from violent shocks. For the nano, Apple went with flash memory chips, the kind in your digital camera or keychain hard drive. These are all-electronic devices that are much tougher than hard drives and need less power. That means Apple could shrink the battery -- the largest and heaviest part of an iPod. Besides, the flash chips are smaller than a hard drive -- much smaller. So while the original iPod was the size of a cigarette pack, this one's the length of a business card and the thickness of $1.25 in quarters.

You'll need a lot more change to buy a nano -- $199 for the version that holds two gigabytes of data or $249 for the four-gig model. But that's a reasonable price for so much data storage. Besides, there's the excellent Apple iPod software for managing your music and other stored files. The classic iPod scroll wheel is smaller but as functional as ever. The sound is superb, and amazingly loud for so small a device. A colleague seated about six feet away could hear Pavarotti belting out arias from Verdi's ''Rigoletto." And besides the music, this little thing even comes with a color screen that displays album covers or family snapshots.

The nano is not without minor flaws. Forget about using its color screen as a portable photo album: It's far too small, smaller than the screen of your average cellphone. It's good enough to show off close-up shots of people's faces, but not much else. I used it to view images of my travels through Taiwan, and the only reason I could recognize the pictures was that I'd shot them myself.

But with the help of additional software, you can run slideshows from your iPod by plugging it into any computer. For instance, ThinkFree Inc. makes a $40 office software suite with graphics that play back over any iPod with a color screen. Just plug the iPod into any PC or Mac and let the show begin.

One other quibble. Four years after the first iPod, Apple is still going with mirrored stainless steel for the back of the case. It shows fingerprints, thereby defacing this lovely device the moment you touch it. The iPod Mini's brushed aluminum look is the right idea: Too bad Apple has given it up.

Still, the nano's pretty much a guaranteed hit. I'm not so sure about the iTunes phone, otherwise known as the Rokr and manufactured by Motorola. While the Globe wasn't provided a unit for serious testing, we did get a hands-on demonstration from Cingular Wireless, the cellphone company with exclusive rights to peddle the new phone.

We might have hoped for another Razr, the stunning little cellphone that dazzled the world last year. No such luck. Instead, the Rokr is a drab little lozenge of a camera phone, without a hint of iPod personality -- not even the magical scroll wheel. It's just a cellphone that plays music -- and only 100 songs at that. For this, Cingular hopes to charge $249 with a two-year cellular contract. You're better off spending the money on a nano.

And don't doubt that Apple knows it. The master marketers of high tech knew that after hyping the iTunes since last summer, they needed to serve up something overwhelming.

And so they have. Just not what we expected.

Hiawatha Bray can be reached at bray@globe.com.