I will be getting this one

IPod's Law: The Impossible Is Possible

APPLE says its iPod music player and iTunes music store have 74 and 85 percent of their worldwide markets. But according to Gene Munster, a Piper Jaffray analyst, the end is near. "Nobody can sustain an 80 percent market share in a consumer electronics business for more than two or three years," Mr. Munster told CNN. "It's pretty much impossible."

Well, he's right about one thing: Apple's market share won't stay at 80 percent. It's about to go up.

If you doubt it, then you haven't yet handled the iPod Nano: a tiny, flat, shiny wafer of powerful sound that Apple unveiled last week. Beware, however: to see one is to want one. If you hope to resist, lash your credit card to your wallet like Odysseus to the mast.

Some music players contain a tiny hard drive, offering huge capacity. Others store music on memory chips, which permit a much more compact design. (This type is known as a flash-memory player, or flash for short.)

What's so clever about the iPod Nano ($249) is that it merges these two approaches. It contains memory chips, so it's dazzlingly tiny - 3.5 by 1.6 by 0.27 inches, to be exact, about the size of a folded playing card and thin enough to slip under a door. Yet because Apple stuffed it with four gigabytes of memory, it holds as much music as some hard-drive players - more than 1,000 songs. (Apple also offers a $199 model with half the capacity.) Because it contains no moving parts, the Nano is less delicate than full-size iPods and virtually skip-proof.

To sweeten the deal, Apple endowed the Nano with a sharp color screen (176 by 132 pixels, 1.5 inches diagonal), the better to show off album-cover art, your photo collection and the iPod's famously clean menu system. The Nano even has room for a click wheel, the scrolling device that makes iPod navigation simple even when you're hunting for a musical needle in a haystack of albums.

The resulting slab is sweet, small and shiny, a comfortable fit in the middle third of your palm. It weighs so little (1.5 ounces), you don't have to worry about dropping it onto pavement; even if it flies from your hands, the earbud cord catches it like a leash. Once again, Apple has mastered a lesson that its rivals seem unable to absorb: that the three most important features in a personal music player are style, style and style.

Apple is so confident in the Nano's appeal, in fact, that it has decided to make room in the product line by discontinuing the world's best-selling player, the iPod Mini. That's a gutsy move, because the Nano isn't really the same thing.

THE Mini, for example, was available in four metallic colors; the Nano comes only in shiny black or white. (Both have the traditional fingerprint-prone chrome back panel. And both come with earbuds in the traditional status-symbol color, which PC Magazine wittily calls "mug-me white.") The Mini held much more music, too; $200 for four gigabytes of storage instead of two, for example.

The Nano's battery doesn't last as long, either: 14 hours instead of the Mini's 18, and rival flash players' batteries run much longer still. And the Nano can't connect to your Mac or PC with a FireWire cable, as all previous iPods could (except the Shuffle). Instead, the Nano comes with a snow-white U.S.B. cable.

If your computer has a U.S.B. 2.0 jack, filling up your Nano takes about the same time as a FireWire cable would; for example, 700 songs and 1,200 photos take about nine minutes to transfer from your computer on the very first sync. But if your computer has only a regular U.S.B. 1.1 connector (and this includes Macs that are only two years old), you could practically sing your songs in the time it takes to transfer them to the Nano.

Finally, as much as the Nano may look like a scale model of the original iPod, it lacks some familiar features. It can display photos on its postage-stamp screen, but can't connect to a TV for showing off to the masses, as the big iPods can. None of the current iPod microphones, remote controls or digital camera photo-transfer adapters work on the Nano, which lacks the necessary jacks. (The Nano does have a standard iPod docking connector, however, so you can still use iPod speakers, chargers and some FM-radio car transmitters.)

But even though Apple taketh away, Apple also giveth; the Nano offers a raft of features never before seen in an iPod. A world clock shows you what time it is in several cities of your choice. The elegant new digital stopwatch, complete with lap counter, is a natural enhancement on a gadget whose fan club includes an awful lot of joggers and gym members. And if you've caught nosy co-workers toying with your 'Pod once too often, you can now lock them out with a four-digit password.

Like other iPods, the new one is designed to synchronize its audio material with the free iTunes jukebox software for Mac and Windows; it handles songs copied from your own CD collection, songs you've bought from Apple's online music store, audio books from Audible.com, and any of 15,000 free weekly podcasts (wildly uneven, and wildly entertaining, amateur radio shows). But only the Nano identifies, with a blue dot, the podcasts you haven't yet listened to, and only the Nano can display the lyrics of whatever song is now playing. (That trick requires you to install the new 5.0 version of iTunes and paste the lyrics in yourself.)

Most iPods have long been able to keep your address book and calendar synched with your computer - if it's a Mac. But thanks to iTunes 5.0, the Nano and other iPods can import this information automatically from Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express on a Windows PC.

Some critics have complained that the Nano's headphone jack is on the bottom edge, not the top. That particular invention's mother may have been necessity - as it is, you wonder how Apple crammed so many components into a machine the size of a gum wrapper - but it turns out to be a blessing in a couple of situations.

First, when you extract the iPod from your pocket, you no longer have to flip it around to see its screen and controls. Second, Apple offers a pricey but extremely convenient accessory called Lanyard Headphones ($39): a simple, tangle-free way to both wear and hear your iPod while you walk, work out or drive. Because the Nano hangs upside-down from the lanyard, the text on the screen is upright when you glance down at your stomach.

The Nano will not come as good news to the growing membership of the curmudgeon club: people who resent the iPod's success (22 million sold so far) and its trendiness. They're fond of declaring that other players offer more features for less money.

In this case, however, they'll have a tough time. Want to know what happens when you pit other players against the Nano, mano a mano? You give up, because no other flash player on the market offers anything close to the Nano's concept or capacity.

Two-gigabyte flash players are rare as hen's teeth in the United States, and rival four-gigabyte models are nonexistent (one gigabyte is generally the maximum). Color screens are uncommon on flash players, too; Samsung and iRiver each make one, but they're a lot bigger, uglier and less capacious.

So are the analysts right that the sun will soon set on the iPod Age? The truth is, the iPod has faced stiff competition from some of the industry's best-known companies since the day it was introduced. Yet even after four years, all of Dell's horses and all Sony's men haven't made a dent in the iPod's dominance. And with the introduction of gorgeous, functional and elegant iPod Nano, that's not about to change.