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A few days ago my daughter’s 8GB third generation iPod Nano refused to power on. After a bit of investigation on my part it seemed as if the battery had given up the ghost – the iPod works perfectly when the sync cable is plugged in and connected to a computer, but the minute the cable is removed, it powers off.

Being out of warranty (it was purchased about 16 months ago – let me not start ranting about batteries that fail after such a short period of light to medium use), I looked around for repair options. Replacement batteries are fairly easy to come by, but the Nano isn’t the easiest piece of hardware to disassemble. Having learned the hard way, I’m really not a big fan of repairing mobile phones and similar devices myself – I always end up snapping a piece of plastic or bending something beyond repair. Taking that into consideration, I decided to look online for someone to do the battery replacement.

Apple themselves will replace the battery for the princely sum of £46.13 (including shipping), which seems just a tad pricey – a new fourth generation 8GB iPod Nano costs only £107. The well-known Juice Your iPod will perform the service for a much more reasonable $32 (excluding shipping), but it seems a little silly to ship an iPod half way around the world to have its battery replaced. I then came across UK iPod Repairs, who’ll do the replacement for a reasonable £30, excluding shipping. I’ve placed an order with them and will be sending them the iPod tomorrow. According to the site, I should get the repaired item back by the middle of next week – expect an update once that’s happened.

Update:Unfortunately the problem wasn’t the battery, it was the logic board. As a replacement would’ve cost in the region of £80, I ended up buying a replacement fourth generation Nano for her (£105).

I got myself a new phone yesterday – a Sony Ericsson P910i. It seems to be quite an upgrade from my P800, even though they have a fair amount of common hardware (including the CPU). The screen is much better – 256K colours instead of 4096 and the “GameBoy” effect of the P800 display is gone. Yay! There seem to be minor improvements everywhere, including T9 predictive text support and the ability to create folders for SMSs. How the P800 could have been released without T9 I have no idea. I’m still busy moving my applications, ebooks, etc across and configuring the P910i to my liking, a slow and painful process.

As much as I like the Px00 series phones, they have a few “features” that some find too annoying to work around. I agree that they aren’t perfect, but I think they’re the best family of smartphones current available.

One thing that’s pretty cool – I managed to get a R1,000 ($170) discount on the phone after moaning that the amount I’d have to pay in was too high. Thanks Vodacom Service Provider Company.

More comments in a few weeks once I’ve used the phone more.

I’m sure this is old news, but I spotted something interesting in a Samsung brochure I received in the mail last week – quite a few of their newer DVD players support DivX. I’m pretty surprised that a major manufacturer of consumer electronics is supporting a format that has such a chequered history, but kudos to them. For more info, check out the Samsung site. If you are a Samsung DVD player owner, they are offering a firmware upgrade for some of their DVD players which adds DivX support.

On a related note, I see a few of their portable music players (like the Yepp) support Ogg Vorbis.