There's a new iPod in town, and its name is nano "iPod nano" to be precise. At a special music event in September, Steve Jobs introduced the nano as the replacement for Apple's enormously popular "iPod mini". The new portable music player comes in 2GB ($199) and 4GB ($249) versions and is available in either black or white.

As its name implies, the nano is small really, really small. It weighs just an ounce and a half and is about as thick as a stack of six credit cards. Apple achieves such miniaturization primarily by using flash-based memory, rather than a hard drive (which you'd find in a full-size iPod or an iPod mini), to store your music, photos, and other data.

Despite its small exterior, the nano has a crisp color display and like current full-size iPods and the iPod mini a Click Wheel. While the wheel has been shrunk, it's clearly marked and very responsive. The screen looks great it's bright and readable. The nano also feels perkier than other iPods, scrolling very quickly through a window full of songs, moving rapidly from one screen to the next, and flying through pictures.

Unlike other iPods nano has its headphone port on its bottom, next to the dock connector. The Hold switch remains, all alone, on the top. The nano also has the same 30-pin dock connector as the iPod and the iPod mini, making it compatible with more than 1,000 accessories designed for the iPod, including Apple's own sync cable. The nano ships with a USB 2.0 cable (the only kind that will both charge and sync this model a Wire Fire cable will only charge it), Apple's standard earbuds, two sets of foam covers for the earbuds, and an iPod Dock Adapter a white plastic insert that allows you to plug the iPod nano into a standard iPod dock.

In our first tests, the nano took around seven minutes to sync approximately 900 songs about as quick as other Click Wheel iPods. Syncing music didn't slow down even when iTunes was optimizing photos for the nano the two processes can occur at the same time. As with other iPods that have limited storage, if your music collection exceeds the nano's capacity, iTunes will offer to create a selection of music for you. And as with other iPods, this playlist-creation feature isn't terribly discerning in one initial test, it placed all of the Griffin iTrip's five-second configuration tones on the nano.

The latest iPod also includes some features not found on any other. The first is the Stopwatch, which can track total time and lap time, as well as summary statistics such as longest laps, shortest laps, and average lap time. The nano also includes a new clock, which shows the current time in an analog and digital display. Unlike previous clocks, it lets you view multiple clocks with individual alarms and sleep timers, and clocks change from light to dark depending on the time of day.

Another new software feature is Screen Lock, which lets you lock your iPod's screen. Like a cheap bike lock, Screen Lock lets you create a four-digit numeric password. The interface features a round combination wheel beneath four spaces for digits, When the screen is locked, you can only pause and play the iPod you can't even adjust the volume because turning the wheel adjusts the currently selected digit. Even when you reset the iPod, it boots back into the Screen Lock screen.

Less Is More?

While the nano is undeniably cool, some buyers may wonder why they should pay $50 more for the 4GB nano than they paid for the 4GB mini, or why the 2GB nano costs the same as that 4GB mini. If price per gigabyte is your only concern, that could be a valid complaint. Yet people made similar rumblings about the iPod mini, which cost only $50 less than the 20GB full-size iPod. Although that didn't appear to he a good bargain in a strict gigabyte-per-dollar sense, the mini still became Apple's most popular iPod model to date.

Buyers might also kvetch about that color screen: Compared with images on the full-size iPod's screen, pictures and album art on the nano's screen are tiny. Also, unlike previous photo-capable iPods, the nano can't display pictures on a television; nor can it use Apple's iPod Camera Connector or Belkin's Media Reader (which means that you can't upload pictures to it unless you do so from your Mac).

Still, with its svelte size and skip-proof storage and that elegant Apple design it's an impressive replacement for the monochrome iPod mini.

Competition in the MP3-player market is increasingly fierce, but Apple continues to outpace all comers. With a 74 percent share of this market as well as a download rate of 1.8 million songs per day from the iTunes Music Store, and an 82 percent market share of legal music downloads in the United States Apple is clearly the market leader. But as Apple's director of iPod Product Marketing, Stan Ng, says, "We can't stand still. People have had their sights on the iPod mini for the holiday buying season and we just changed everything. We continue to innovate; our tagline says it all Impossibly Small."

And for people who may be disappointed that Apple's newest iPod lacks certain capabilities, Jupiter's Gartenberg adds, "These announcements show the naysayers who believe Apple should release a video iPod that there is still a lot of life left in music."