We were also disappointed that you can't change the function of the Shake – we'd have found it more useful if it had simply skipped to the next track in a playlist rather than shuffle amongst your whole music library each time, especially since the introduction of Genius (more on that later) means everybody will be using playlists more often than before.

Gimmicks galore

As it stands there's no way to change what a Shake does in the iPod's settings and Steve Jobs' legendary reality distortion field isn't going to work on us here. Like the Cover Flow view, where you can flip through album artwork to browse, Shake to shuffle is really just a gimmick you use to impress your non-iPod nano owning friends, rather than something really useful you'll use much.

The new Genius feature however is really quite clever. It uses Apple's huge database of iTunes owners music libraries and playlists to work out what songs go well together in a playlist.

Once you've activated Genius on your iPod (for which it needs to be connected to iTunes) you simply select a song on your iPod, hold down the centre button and select Start Genius. Your iPod instantly creates a Genius playlist of 25 songs from your music library that it thinks fit well with your chosen song.

If you don't like the look of your playlist you can ask Genius to have another go at it by selecting Refresh. If you're happy with the list then click Save and you've got a permanent copy of your playlist. Genius is a simple concept, but the simplicity belies its power.

You'll find you really will start rediscovering parts of your music collection you haven't listened to in years.

Solid battery performance

Before we finish it's worth noting that when it comes to battery life Apple has dropped the video playback time from five hours to four. This will be because of the larger screen, but music playback time stays at 24 hours. As usual for Apple's estimates we obtained the same results in our tests.

So that, in a nutshell, is the new iPod nano. Some people might buy one because it now comes in pink, some people might buy one because of its new shake to shuffle feature, but you shouldn't be swayed by such trifles.

What makes the new iPod nano a winner is the larger screen size, Genius playlists and the new accelerometer based games, and for us, those are reasons enough.