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New 4G iPod Nano has Bluetooth chip

by on12 September 2008

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Opening the new Nano unlocks future secrets

If you happen to be brave enough to take one of the new iPod Nanos apart you will find that it has a couple of interesting surprises inside that could tell you more about the direction of the iPod in the future than anything else that you might hear.

First, the biggest news has to be that the new Nano has a Bluetooth chip in it. While Apple makes no direct mention of Bluetooth by name, they do bury in the specs that the Nano is able to talk to the Nike+ products using 2.4GHz wireless support. The 2.4GHz does appear to be using this Bluetooth chip to handle the communications.

The addition of Bluetooth technology in the Nano is a major step toward the announcement of additional Bluetooth accessories for the iPod, but the biggest has to be the ability to use Bluetooth wireless headphones with the iPod Nano, which is something a lot of people have been wanting for some time.

According to a shadow dweller that we spoke with, the reason that Apple has not enabled the Bluetooth has more to do with optimizing and conserving battery life than it does anything else. While we find it hard to believe, we think it is possible that using the Bluetooth all of the time in a wireless headphones mode, for example, could burn the battery life much quicker. We were told that Apple is working on this issue and optimizing the Bluetooth for future generations of the Nano, but don’t expect to see it enabled on this version for full Bluetooth support, but likely possible in future generations.

One other news of note is about the inside of the new Nano. It would appear that the Nano is able to support an external microphone and our shadow dweller tells us that it will be enabled with an upcoming firmware release. The headphone jack has five leads coming off it and previous versions of the Nano only had four leads, which does seem to confirm what we have been told. A microphone accessory is said to be in the planning stages and is expected to be announced in a future revision of the firmware.

Last modified on 13 September 2008
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