This post has nothing to do with science or art. I just want to toss some information out there for my fellow iPod users. When a friend recently bought an ipod nano, I realized I’d better warn him about a few things, and if I was going to do that, I might as well write a post for any one else who cares.
In a nutshell: do not let your nano get wet! This may seem fairly obvious, but in addition to not immersing your nano in the toilet, or the swimming pool, or the river (which I almost did once), you should avoid exposing it to rain or sweat. Don’t let it get even the slightest little isty-bitsy tiny bit damp.
I have to disclose that I adore my 4GB nano, which I bought almost one year ago. I run every day, so it’s on for at least an hour, usually more. (At one point I estimated that I spend 1/12 of my life listening to my nano, which is just alarming). I don’t bother with an armband – I just drop the nano in my pocket. It weighs so little, I don’t even feel it. Wonderful flash technology! If it completely dies tomorrow, I will be satisfied that I got my money out of it and immediately go buy another one.
But I’m sentimental about this nano, and when it started to fail a few months ago, even though it was still under warranty, I wanted to save it (and didn’t want to wait two weeks for a refurbished replacement to be shipped back). The problem? It started giving an error message – “Firewire not supported” – and freezing up, even when it wasn’t plugged in. It did so while I was using it, when I wasn’t using it, when it was asleep on the table – all the time. After the error message appeared, it would remain on continuously until the battery died. Even if I could coax it into responding by resetting it, so I could change playlists and access the menu, it seemed to have lost the ability to “go to sleep.” The battery was taking a beating. Wiping and reinstalling the software via iTunes was only a temporary fix. A quick check of the hard drive indicated it was fine. The USB cable was not the problem, nor was the USB port, and the nano had never in its life been plugged into a firewire port.
So I did some internet research and discovered that this has happened to other people, with the commonality seeming to be water. Some poor little nanos had even been left in the rain! My nano, in contrast, is babied – it’s hardly ever out of my sight. It has never been exposed to water, except for a little workout-induced sweat, or the ambient humidity outside on cloudy days. But just in case that was the problem, I did the same thing I did to a wet Sony Walkman eight years ago: I baked it.
I put the nano a few inches above a heat vent, tilted with the pin end up, and left it there until it seemed probable that the hypothetical water would have evaporated (two days). Then I reset it (holding down the clickwheel) and reinstalled the software. I baked, reset, reinstalled three times consecutively, which seems like absolute voodoo, but it worked. It’s been over two months and I haven’t seen the Firewire error again.
Now, obviously this is not an Apple-approved fix, so use it at your own risk, etc. The main point I’d like to make is that it apparently is not ok to have moisture, even invisible moisture, near the nano’s exposed metal pins. This is a problem, because most skins don’t cover the pins; if they did, you’d have to remove the skin to charge it. So even though my nano was always in a skin, its pins were unprotected. If the pins are so sensitive, I wish that Apple would provide some sort of plug to cover them. You have to expect an mp3 player to get sweaty!
Instead of a skin, I’ve gone back to using the flimsy grey pocket-shaped slipcover that came with my nano. Since I don’t use an armband, it’s not an inconvenience, except that the pins are on the same end as the earbud jack, so to protect the pins, I have to double the earbud cord back and out the top of the slipcover. Very nonoptimal (are you listening, Apple?). I’m lucky I kept the slipcover at all – my friend threw his away immediately upon buying his nano, because he thought it was cheesy (it is).
After all of this, I will still buy another nano when this one dies. I love the damn thing, and I enjoy running so much more now that I have it. But this does seem to be a problem that’s worth a little preventative effort up front. HTH.