Apple iPod Nano 3rd Generation: A Bit Quirky

My girlfriend (Robyn) received an Apple iPod Nano (3rd generation) for her birthday back in October and has never gotten the chance to use it. Why? Unfortunately she does not own a computer (which isn’t a bad thing) so she hasn’t been able to load any music on it.

Now the quirk I found with this particular Nano is that when I went to go plug it into my computer via USB to load songs into it it would just constantly reboot itself. Windows was having troubles loading the driver for the Nano and I thought there was something wrong with it. Afterall an iPod that reboots over and over again is a bad thing right?

I started to wonder if this Apple iPod Nano of Robyn’s was defective! She hasn’t even gotten to use it yet! I was a bit disappointed, I then got a thought; why not dock it into my alarm clock to see if its a charging issue.

I slide it into the dock on my XtremeMac Luna Alarm clock and it turned on and began charging. So far so good. After a little bit (roughly 20 minutes) I took it from the dock and plugged it back into my desktop computer and viola! Windows recognized it properly and loaded the proper USB driver for it and it came up in iTunes without an issue.

Now Robyn’s iPod is happy with its 400+ songs and she will get to use it on our trip to the Domincan Republic!

So it seems that if your iPod Nano is having issues connecting to your machine, check to see if it has a charge, or be a bit more patient that I was, and have it reboot enough times via the USB cable to build a large enough charge to stay connected.