Farewell to the clickwheel?

Out of all the iPod's I've been fortunate enough to own over the years, the 4th Generation model iPod Nano has been my favorite. It struck the perfect balance of size, screen usability, and heft in the hand.

What made it best for me though, was that incredible click wheel. There are people that will probably be happy to see the venerable clickwheel go, but they're are superior to multi-touch screens in two significant ways.

• Pause/play, skip songs, without looking at the device.
• Fine tune volume without looking in a more elegant way.

While younger folks might not appreciate the second too much, for most of us, turning volume up and down with a knob seems more natural. Sure, that's a relic of potentiometers. Nevertheless, I find the circular motion of clickwheel volume far more granular and controllable than a series of buttons or onscreen controls.

Multi-Touch screens are great for some things. Yet I can't help thinking that Apple has gone a little overboard here. Some people argue that music collections are too big for the original iPod navigation system chickwheel support. There may be something to that, but I have never felt the replacement (I do have a 1G iPhone) music interface was better. In fact, I find that interface so awkward that I don't use the iPod functions on my iPhone at all.

That's probably the rub. I use the iPod as a music playback device only. While device convergence is inevitable and all the rage, the simplicity of clickwheel based iPods make them, in my eyes, superior music playback devices. Further, I think some of this has to due with how a person listens to music. For people that buy mostly singles and songs, features like shuffle and genius probably seem heaven sent. For many of us that import full albums from our CDs (hence being album oriented to begin with), those features aren't that compelling. I'm typically listening to full albums (occasionally skipping some songs). When I do listen to playlists, they're usually carefully crafted ones that I listen to in order. Like this:

I Can't Quit You, Baby	Willie Dixon	I Am the Blues
I Can't Quit You Baby	Led Zeppelin	Led Zeppelin I
You Shook Me	Muddy Waters	Muddy Waters, Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues
You Shook Me	Led Zeppelin	Led Zeppelin I
19 Years Old	Muddy Waters	Hoochie Coochie Man
I Can't Quit You Baby	Led Zeppelin	BBC Sessions (Disc 1)
Killing Floor	Howlin' Wolf	Blues You Can Use
The Lemon Song	Led Zeppelin	Led Zeppelin II
Bring It On Home (Single)	Sonny Boy Williamson	His Best
Bring It On Home	Led Zeppelin	Led Zeppelin II
Jesus Make Up My Dying Bed	Blind Willie Johnson	Dark Was the Night
In My Time Of Dying	Led Zeppelin	Physical Graffiti (Disc 1)
In My Time Of Dying	Led Zeppelin	DVD (Disc 2)
When The Levee Breaks	Memphis Minnie	Queen Of The Blues
When The Levee Breaks	Led Zeppelin	IV

As for dropping video on the nano (display and recording), I'm not too disappointed. I've never used the video capability on any of my iPods, and friends with 5th Generation model iPod nanos don't use the video recording capabilities on theirs. Those features have always fallen under the "I'm glad it can, but never use it" category for us. Other than using the world clock function on the rare occasions that I am traveling, my iPod only sees action in the music section of the menus.

I'm not alone in these concerns. Chris S. and Michael wrote very similar pieces in the OWC blog concerning the new nano's transition to screen based controls. The Register has a write up on all of the new iPods. Their comments on the iPod Classic are interesting. My second most used iPod is my 40GB pre-classic iPod, something that I would only replace with an iPod classic as opposed to an iPod touch.