Apple iPod Touch 16GB MP3 Player Review - Media Interface

Basic Playback     (9.00)
The onscreen media player will put all the playback controls at your fingertips. Play/pause and the skip keys have their own dedicated buttons within the software. Fast-forward and rewind can be done either by holding the skip buttons, or you simply tap the point on the slider you want to skip to. This touch-to-skip-to functionality is far superior to using a scroll wheel to find a specific spot in the song.

Advanced Playback     (6.65)
The Nano has standard iPod options for playback. The settings menu will allow you to toggle shuffle and repeat settings. The two shuffle options available are to shuffle songs within your current playlist or shuffle songs by album. Repeat options include looping the playlist once it's finished or repeating one song ad infinitum. While good options, we're not sure why the "repeat one" feature wasn't more easily accessible. Chances are you'll want to implement it for a particularly catchy song, let it play until you get sick of it, then flip it off. As it is, leaving this setting on means any given song will repeat until you skip to a new one. Therefore, when you hear a catchy song, you have to sift through a few menus in order to get the song to repeat, then re-sift through those menus to resume normal playback. Though a minor gripe, those who use "repeat one" a lot will undoubtedly get annoyed by the feature's relative inaccessibility.

The "Now Playing" screen will display a few tidbits of information about the song currently playing. A song's title, artist, album, and position in the playlist will all be visible, along with the cover art from the song's album. If you have a shuffle or repeat feature enabled, there will be a small symbol displayed at the bottom of the screen.