The ability to make music listening portable has been in the consumer’s line of sight since the first Sony Walkman emerged, but since then portable players have been shrinking in size. From the Minidisk player to the iPod, music playing media have gotten progressively smaller, in an effort to fit in with the hectic lifestyles that prefer as little baggage as possible to accompany them. For most people, the iPod was thought to be as good as music portability gets. That is until the development of the iPod Mini and its successor, the iPod Nano.

The iPod is undoubtedly a dream of portability for the music lover, allowing him or her to carry enormous amounts of music in a hand held device. But for some, the device, about ten centimetres in length, six in width and around one and a half in depth was too burdensome still, and so the iPod mini was born.

As in most areas of electronic engineering, improvements are made at a rate that is astounding to the consumer, and new versions of electronic products become available quicker than you can master the now obsolete item you bought. So it might have seemed when the iPod Mini was replaced by the iPod Nano, but there have been improvements made between these items that does make the Nano more desirable to many iPod users. If the selling point of the Mini was it’s reduced size then the Nano certainly outdid its predecessor – it is sixty-two percent smaller that the iPod that came before. The Nano manifestation of the iPod music player also includes a color screen, something that was missing in the Mini, so the discontinuation of the old to make way for the new genuinely represented an advancement in the smallest of the small portable music playing appliances.

While the iPod Nano includes a smaller storage capacity that its full sized counterpart – twenty gigabytes or forty compared to the iPod’s thirty or sixty, depending on the price you are prepared to pay – its tiny size and light weight make it an enormously appealing music player to those who really do like to travel light. Ideal for those who like to walk or jog, or those who simply like to get up and go, the iPod Nano really does allow you move without anything to weigh you down.