I had no realization that the 4th generation iPod Nano was such a new product. It was only announced in September of 2008, and probably only shipped in quantity for the Christmas season.
Mine may be the singularly most elegantly designed and carefully crafted device I have ever owned. The device is amazingly light and thin. Any decently sized set of headphones, including earbuds, seems to have much more mass than the Nano. It screams out to be constantly held. Or left out on your desk to attract envious admirers. The LCD display makes a major difference. If your music has proper images attached, you really do get the experience of having beautifully designed cover art available.
There are also numerous sleek little touches, like reflecting the cover art into the track display area. Also, they fixed one of my major nits with the Mini. The Nano now horizontally scrolls long title, artist, and album names. This crops up quite frequently in the land of DJ mixed music.
CoverFlow is sort of a bust for me though. In continuing news, Apple seems to be well nigh actively hostile to folks that use playlists to any significant extent. Makes the ability to use the Nano’s accelerometer to slip into CoverFlow sort of useless. However, the auto-rotation is really handy for photo viewing.
I haven’t used an iPhone or iPod touch, but if you don’t need you’re media player jammed up with your phone, or you don’t need a bunch of apps, I can highly recommend the Nano as a media device.