Ponderance

(May 2003 - March 2007.) Tama's thoughts on the blogosphere, podcasting, popular culture, digital media and citizen journalism posted from a laptop computer somewhere in Perth's isolated, miniature, urban jungle ...

iPod Nano Engraving Restrictions?

Thursday, September 08, 2005
Okay, the big, over-hyped Apple announcement was pretty good. Firstly, the Rokr, an iTunes integrated phone as well as the new ultra-slim, ultra-sexy iPod Nano to replace the mini range. In Australia, the 4GB model clocks in at $359 which seems reasonable. All excited, I thought I'd get a nano since my 20GB iPod skips too much when I go walking. Engraving seems like a good idea, but ...
I Can't Name a Nano?
... my NAME or my EMAIL ADDRESS have been blacklisted by Apple?!? Huh? After a few deep breaths and a bit of experimentation, I discovered Apple won't allow any email addresses to be engraved ...
No Email Addresses in Nano Engravings

While this seems bizzare, there may be just a technical fault in the AppleStore. Or, Apple may have banned email addresses from engraving, but why would they do that? The annoying thing, though, is that my 20GB 3G iPod is engraved with my email address. Now they'll never match.

On the up side, the time spent trying to get the engraving to work gave me pause, and now I think I'll wait and see what the rest of the world thinks about the nanos for a few weeks before buying one.

Update (Thursday, 8 Sept 2005, 3.40pm): Someone by the username pedraum left a comment on my Flickr Nano photo saying "We know about this and are working on it...I promise!", so I'm presuming he works for Apple and the naming thing is a glitch in their system.

Update 2 (Thursday, 15 Sept 2005, 11.10am): Just tried again (and in the US store in case it was an Australian Applestore only problem) and still can't engrave an email address. The "@" symbol will work by itself, but not when used as part of an email address (or between any two words). From the comments at Flickr, it seems Apple support is telling people they won't be fixing this. I still can't find a reason for this anywhere on the Applestore site. Not happy.

Update 3 (Sunday, 9 October 2005, 8.10am): The restrictions are lifted (or, more accurately, the database bug is fixed). An iPod Nano engraved with my name is now held in my waiting-to-confirm list in Australian Applestore ... now I just want to wait until the next run of nano's has the scratchy screen fixed!

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1 Comments:

At 9/15/2005 11:43:00 pm, Anonymous Anonymous said...

I just tried on the UK applestore and I get the same problem. In fact I cannot get it to accept a lone @ on the 2nd line but it would accept it on the first. Anyway, it's an email address I want. UK applestore said there was a problem with non-alphanumeric characters and it's been happening for a couple of weeks.

Dave

 

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