Geek & Mild by Sean Sperte

Sep 13th, 2005 Thin Is In

There was this one Sanyo phone that a buddy of mine owned way back in the day; it was super-thin and super sexy. Maybe it was a Panasonic … I don’t remember. Anyway, from then on I knew that thin is in. It took a while, but Apple realized it too, and did the 17” PowerBook G4 thing with their less-than-one-inch claim. Motorola finally jumped on the trend, too, with the RAZR mobile phone. Now, Apple’s really taking it to the next level with the nano. Of course, my own design reflects this trend-setting motif as well.

It’s interesting that we desire thin over fat. Besides increased mobility (a trait we could easily overcome if we put our minds to it) there’s really no logical reason to choose a thin or smaller device over a larger one. Nevertheless, we do.

I spent part of my weekend trying to track down an iPod nano here locally (we have 4 Apple Stores in the area). I found a store that still had a few 4GB models in stock, so I decided to try and make it; even though I was told the line at the registers was out the door. Long story short, I didn’t make it. Let’s just say, Husky traffic sucks.

Why do I want the nano so bad, though? Feature-wise the thing falls short in many areas:

• Storage
• FM (broadcast and receive)
• Microphone
• FireWire
• Battery life

How does it fall short, you ask? Just ask Creative. Their Zen MicroPhoto device beats out the nano in every one of those categories (with the exception of FireWire suppoort). But the Creative player is ugly and sports ugly colors … and is big. Got that? Big.

So for an extra 2GB, a FM receiver, microphone, removable battery, and a savings of $20, I could get myself a (not-so) fancy Zen MicroPhoto. There’s no way in [edit] I’m going to, though. Apple’s quality, design and interface is just too sexy. It’s clean. It’s thin. It’s in.

What makes the freakin’ thing so in?

It doesn’t matter, really. The thing is what it is, and I want one. We all want one.