Why change the background image in the iPod Nano Chromatic / 4 generation?

by Doina Stefanescu  |  February 3, 2009

Because the iPod Nano is more of a player than a viewer like it's older brothers, the iPod Touch or iPhone, it's on screen functionality has been developed to sustain only album artwork during playback time, and although this is a  more than interesting feature, it's still not enough as users have complained about the inability of changing the background images in the 4th generation iPod Nano.

The question revealed by the latest keyword queries, as shown by Analytics, is what to do about the background image in the iPod Nano Chromatic. While this iPod model has some built-in features that can not be found yet in other iPod models, or other music players of its kind as a matter of fact, it lacks such a basic feature, to some even unimportant capability, like that of sustaining a background image (a wallpaper), even when it's not playing. The features I'm discussing are the well known Shake to Shuffle and Cover Flow, which, powered by a built-in accelerometer (something like a gyroscope), allow the user to simply change tracks by giving the iPod a shake, or to tilt the iPod from vertical position to horizontal in order to view the album artwork, clips or photos in a wide-screen format.

When you know that Apple went to the extent of developing these entertainment functions, it's really odd how they missed on creating a basic function for a screen wallpaper. There might be a point though. Although capable, the screen of the iPod Nano Chromatic is smaller than those of the iPod Touch or iPhone which are, be designation, a different class of music players, actually they have surpassed the class and have become more like "video" players than music players. So it's arguable enough that the Nano Chromatic, still an iPod, doesn't have video capabilities, even for wallpapers. Moreover, none of the other iPods, like the iPod Classic, which has even a bigger screen, has built-in background functionality. I'm specifying "built-in", as in built by Apple, because there are a few hacks out there that can put just one or a couple of predesignated wallpapers on your iPod, but I wouldn't recommend any of them, because they require downgrading the iPod firmware, which means compatibility issues with iTunes, possible errors, corrupted info and so on.

All those pretty pictures that you can see on the official Apple website, are pictures of iPods already playing some music, and displaying the correspondent album artwork. And when you think about it, you don't look that much at the Ipod Nano Chromatic. You just use it (a lot, I presume) to listen to songs, so why would you need a background image? Unlike the iTouch or iPhone, which can be used to watch videos, access the Web, make calls, write emails, watch Youtube and other stuff. If you just put your Nano Chromatic in your pocket, or purse, and go on listening to your playlist, who is going to watch your nifty background (if they could)?

I think the misunderstanding comes form the fact that the iPod Nano Chromatic looks so awesome and colorful (chromatic, doh..), that you might get the idea that it's more like an iTouch than an iPod. But, as you can see, it's not, although trends are changing so fast, that you might get to put a custom wallpaper background on an iPod-Nano-Touch-Video-Phone-Classic-and-other-Sci-Fi-functions-all-in-one in a not too distant future...

Related articles:

iPod Nano Chromatic: 4th Generation iPod

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