Making Over the iPod Family (Again)

Ah, Christmas!

The iPod Nano family has become wider and shorter and added the ability to play video.

All right, that may not be what you're thinking these days. But that is what Apple was thinking when it introduced its annual revision of the popular iPod family last week. Over all, these music/video players have shrunk in size and price, but have grown in capacity, features and number of models.

The baby of the family, the screenless iPod Shuffle, is almost unchanged. It's still only about one-inch square, with a spring clip. It still holds about 240 songs, but now comes in five brushed-metal color finishes.

The full-size iPod has had a visit from the brushed-metal makeover fairy, too. Its face now comes in silver or black brushed metal - the first major departure from the iconic acrylic façade that has served it well since 2001.

This model, now called the iPod Classic, is the only iPod containing a hard drive (the others use flash memory). It's for people who want to transport big music or video collections - or who want to use the iPod as an external computer hard drive.

That prospect is easier to imagine than ever now that the hard drives in these iPods hold 80 or 160 gigabytes (for 0 or 0).

Wait a minute - 160 gigs? That's bigger than many computer hard drives. It's enough to hold 40,000 songs, which would take about three solid months to play. If the battery could last that long, that is; Apple clocks the larger model at 40 hours of music playback, 7 hours of video. The smaller model gets 30 and 5 hours.

Remember, the original 2001 iPod held 1,000 songs. At this rate of expansion, the iPod of 2010 will hold all six million songs on the iTunes store.

The iPod Nano represents a far more radical redesign. The big change: it now plays video.

Anybody familiar with the previous iPod Nano might wonder just how satisfying TV shows or movies would be on a screen the size of your thumbnail. The same thought must have occurred to Apple, because the new Nano has a much larger screen (two inches diagonal). With 320-by-240 pixels crammed into that space, it also has much finer resolution than the previous Nano - or indeed, than any Apple product in history - which makes video look incredibly sharp.

Here's the funny thing about physics, though: you can't give something a bigger screen without actually making the thing itself bigger. So the Nano is wider and shorter than before.

In photos, without any size reference, the result looks a little weird, slightly foreshortened; the rumor Web sites called it the Nano Fatty. Once you handle this iPod, though, you realize that that nickname is hilariously wrong; at a quarter of an inch thick, you could practically use the Nano as a letter opener.

You just can't conceive that anything this thin could contain a battery (good for 22 hours of audio playback), a screen and 4 or 8 gigabytes of memory (1,000 or 2,000 songs' worth, for 0 or 0). You feel like you're watching movies on a business card.

With a cable, the Nano can even play video on your TV. That's surely a first for a machine the size of a Triscuit.

You'd have to be a real Grinch to find fault with this sweet piece of engineering. But the headphone jack is on the bottom, so the Nano doesn't sit level when you prop it up on a treadmill. And while the Nano's face comes in five brushed-metal colors (is there an echo in here?), its back is now the same mirror-finish chrome as the larger iPods - and a fingerprint magnet.

Both the Nano and the Classic come with three games, new illustrated menus and other software refinements.

The most interesting iPod announcement of all last week, though, was the new iPod Touch, which will be available later this month.

When the iPhone went on sale at the end of June, certain hackers tried to work around the AT&T contract requirement. They wanted the iPhone's spectacular widescreen video playback, wireless Wi-Fi Internet features and its now-famous two-finger touchscreen operating system. They just didn't want the phone.

They needn't have bothered. The new iPod Touch is exactly what they wanted: a dephoned iPhone.

It looks almost identical to the iPhone, except much thinner (0.3 inches). It's available in 8- and 16-gigabyte models, for 0 and 0.

There's the 3.5-inch touch screen; there's the Home screen with tappable icons for Calendar, Clock and Calculator, Music, Videos and Photos. And there, praise be, is the Web browser.

E-mail: pogue@nytimes.com