Damn, that thing is gorgeous. We’ve been expecting updates to the iPod shuffle and mini for a while now but Apple seem to have cross-bred them and created something that has the best parts of both of them. They’ve made it absolutely tiny, and given you the choice of cool white and sexy black. In making it flash-based they’ve also given a real benefit to picking it over the standard iPod – it might have a relatively small amount of storage but it’s significantly smaller (unlike the mini), is entirely skip-proof (unlike the mini), and has a screen and enough storage for a decent amount of music (unlike the shuffle).

Despite the fact that I’m an Apple fan I’ve actually never owned an iPod and at one point was downright hostile towards them. I have an iRiver iHP-120 which I still think is a far better player for the same price – driverless operation, Ogg Vorbis support (far better than both MP3 and AAC), longer battery life, FM radio, line-in recording, voice recording, better sound quality, etc – but I’ve recently gone off the idea of a complete music library in a slightly bulky player and have been looking at a possible flash player. The 4GB nano looks ideal for that and I think it also works as a pretty huge USB flash drive. Much bigger than my current 256MB drive, at least.

I’ve been planning on paying a visit to the Shinjuku Apple store in Tokyo which is supposed to be one of the, if not the, biggest Apple stores in the world (on a related note, check out this video of the queue for the opening of the Ginza Apple store). According to the Japanese online Apple store the 4GB model costs the equivalent of £135 compared to £179 that it costs here, so something tells me I might be buying it there.