The latest iPod reinvention expands the line from three models to four, priced from $79 to $399, with capacities ranging from one gigabyte (roughly 240 songs) to 160 gigabytes (up to 40,000 songs.) And that doesn’t count the iPhone, Apple’s much-hyped cellphone, which also includes a full-blown iPod.

I’ve been testing the newest member of the iPod family, the big-screen iPod Touch. It’s a close cousin to the iPhone that connects to the Internet via Wi-Fi wireless networking and replaces the famous iPod click wheel with a touch screen. It starts at $299, $100 less than the iPhone but with the same eight-gigabyte capacity. There’s also a 16-gigabyte iPod Touch for $399.

Like earlier iPods, the Touch is elegant and capable, and works smoothly with Apple’s free iTunes software for Windows and Macintosh PCs, as well as with its computer-based online iTunes Store, which sells far more downloaded songs and TV shows than any other legal outlet.

Not only that, but the Touch introduces a mobile version of the iTunes store. It’s called the iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store, and it allows you to buy, right on the iPod, any of six million songs for the same price you’d pay on a computer. This portable store will soon be made available on the iPhone as well.

For all its beauty and functionality, the Touch has some quirks and downsides. It’s the first iPod model I’ve ever tested that fell significantly short, in my tests, of Apple’s battery-life claims. It’s also the first iPod that lacks any physical buttons for controlling music playback.

The Touch looks, at first glance, like an iPhone that can’t make phone calls. It’s a handsome, thin, black rectangle with a huge 3.5-inch screen — the same size and resolution as the iPhone’s gorgeous screen. But the Touch is even thinner, and a bit shorter.

Like the iPhone, the Touch has just one button on its face, a Home button, which takes you to the main menu, a series of beautiful square icons. And, like the iPhone, the Touch has an on/off button along the top edge. Most everything else is controlled by Apple’s new “multitouch” touch screen interface, which includes a virtual keyboard for text entry.

But unlike the iPhone, the Touch lacks volume-control buttons and a button on its earbuds for pausing or skipping songs. So you have to play, pause and skip songs by touching the screen. This is made easier by a feature the iPhone lacks (so far): If you double-click the home button, music controls appear on the screen, even if the screen is turned off. Still, you can’t control your Touch by touch when you’re listening to music with the device in your pocket or purse.

In my tests, music and video playback went perfectly, and so did viewing photos. The Wi-Fi functions, including the Web browser, a YouTube video viewer and the new mobile store, also worked perfectly.

The Touch is missing some Internet-oriented features from the iPhone that would work well over Wi-Fi. It lacks the iPhone’s email, mapping, stock tracking and weather programs. But its keyboard has a feature the iPhone lacks: As on a BlackBerry, you can insert a period by double-clicking the space bar.

Apple says the Touch was meant mainly to present typical iPod features, not to replicate the iPhone, and it included the Web browser only so users could get onto Wi-Fi to use the mobile music store in certain places that required a log-in screen.

But it seems ridiculous to me to sell a powerful device with Wi-Fi and a huge screen, and to leave out things like an email program, even though you can use Web-based email programs. I assume Apple was concerned that the less costly Touch might compete too much with the iPhone if it had these features. In fact, if somebody can jam a voice-over-Internet capability into the iPod Touch, it might be more of a threat to the iPhone, which is tethered to a single cellphone carrier, AT&T.

The company claims that the Touch can play music for up to 22 hours and video for up to five hours on a single battery charge, even with Wi-Fi turned on. But in my tests, using factory settings, music playback lasted just under 17 hours and video playback lasted just over four hours. Nearly every other iPod I’ve tested, including the new Nano, handily beat Apple’s battery claims.

Also, some early iPod Touch units have had defective screens, where images appeared too dark. Apple says this problem affected a small number of units and is being remedied. My two test units displayed beautiful images.

Despite these downsides, the Touch is a great media player, and the iPod remains the best end-to-end portable solution for playing and purchasing music and video.

Email me at mossberg@wsj.com. Find all my columns and videos online free at the new All Things Digital Web site, http://walt.allthingsd.com.

The latest, and most unusual, of these music phones has just been announced by Sprint. It’s a Samsung model called the UpStage. The UpStage costs just $149, less than a third of the iPhone’s planned $499 price, and it will go on sale early next month.

Samsung has shown real creativity in solving the problem of cramming a decent music player and phone into one small gadget. The slim UpStage has been designed with two distinct faces. On one side, it has a phone keypad and a small screen, for making voice calls and tapping out text messages. But if you turn it over, you see a larger screen and navigation controls, mainly for playing music, but also for other tasks, such as viewing online data.

Sprint’s UpStage music cellphone by Samsung.

At the same time, Sprint is slashing the price of songs sold on its proprietary music service from an outrageous $2.49 each to just 99 cents. That isn’t quite as cheap as it seems, because you have to pay $15 a month for the privilege of buying the 99-cent songs. But it’s still a positive step for consumers.

I’ve been testing the UpStage and found that its two-sided design works pretty well. It’s a better music phone, in my opinion, than Verizon’s Chocolate model, built by Samsung’s Korean rival, LG.

But the UpStage has too many weaknesses and compromises for me to recommend it. It has lousy battery life, both as a phone and as a music player, a limitation Sprint and Samsung have tried to offset with a free add-on that makes the phone too bulky. And it comes with so little memory that, out of the box, it can hold only around 20 average songs. Adding more capability costs extra, thus lessening the price advantage. There are other downsides as well.

I tested the UpStage primarily as a music player, because that’s its claim to fame. I compared it with the base-model iPod Nano, which also costs $149, although of course it doesn’t include a phone.

I did try out the basic phone stuff, like making calls, all of which seemed OK, though the screen on the phone side of the device is very small, a sort of throwback to early cellphones. Sound quality, reception and the keypad all were fine. The built-in 1.3 megapixel camera is standard for phones these days.

Only one of the phone’s two screens can be used at any one time, and you have to press a “flip” button on the side to switch. This worked well, but was kind of a pain when I was trying to use the keypad to type in text, like a Web password or the name of a new song playlist, on the music side of the phone. I had to flip to the side with the keypad and then flip back.

I loaded in about 20 songs and the UpStage played them back pretty well, displaying all the correct song information and album art. I also loaded in some photos, which also displayed fine, though the phone can handle only small picture files. I purchased a song from Sprint’s music service, and that downloaded and played well.

The only problems were that the album covers and photos looked grainy, because even the larger screen has pretty low resolution. And occasionally, the start of a song was clipped. The iPod Nano exhibits neither of these problems.

Out of the box, the UpStage comes with only a tiny memory card, which can hold only around 20 standard MP3 files. The iPod Nano can hold 500 of those files. To get the same capacity on the UpStage, you have to buy a larger, $40 memory card.

Though the UpStage is bigger than the iPod Nano, it has far worse battery life — just 2.5 hours of talk time for the phone and seven hours of music playback time, compared with up to 24 hours of music playback time for the Nano. To compensate, Sprint is throwing in a “battery wallet,” a case with an additional battery built in. This brings the talk time to 6.3 hours and music playback time to around 17 hours. But it makes the phone twice as thick.

There are two other problems with the UpStage. First, synchronizing its music with songs stored on a PC requires you to install and use Sprint music software. It doesn’t work with Windows Media Player or the Windows version of Apple iTunes, which most music lovers already own. (You also can manually drag and drop songs onto the phone’s memory card.)

Second, the navigation pad on the music side of the phone can be confusing. It works by touch controls; you have to use just the right pressure and slide your finger just the right distance along its sides to get it to work right. It’s too complicated.

Samsung and Sprint deserve credit for a good try with the UpStage. But it doesn’t quite cut it.

Email me at mossberg@wsj.com. See video versions of my reviews at wsj.com/mossbergvideo.

This year, that tower of babble is higher than ever, as new terms have come into being, and old ones have come to the fore. So, here’s a quick glossary of some of the current techno terms you may encounter when shopping for a computer, television, digital camera or cellphone this holiday season.

Aero: This is the graphical user interface that’s a key part of Microsoft’s new Windows Vista operating system, due out around Jan. 30. If you want to get the full benefit of Vista, make sure any Windows PC you buy this season is capable of running Aero. Many are not.

Antiblur: Also known as antishake or image stabilization, this is a crucial feature of digital cameras today. Because few cameras have optical viewfinders, users tend to hold them at arm’s length to frame the shot on the LCD screen. This increases the likelihood of shaking the camera. An anti-blur feature can correct that. The best antiblur technology is optical. Digital versions are less effective.

Draft N: This is a new, faster, longer-range version of the popular Wi-Fi wireless networking system, and many new Wi-Fi products are built to comply with it. It succeeds the common “G” flavor of Wi-Fi. But, there’s a catch. As the name implies, this technology is based on a draft of the forthcoming new Wi-Fi standard, to be called “N.” And the final standard could be different enough to make Draft N gear outdated in 12 to 18 months.

Dual Boot: A computer that is configured to boot, or to start up, in two different operating systems, depending on which the user chooses at any one time. The most important example of this currently is on Apple’s Macintosh computers, which now can be set up to run either the Mac operating system or Microsoft Windows using Apple’s free dual-boot software, called Boot Camp.

Dual Core: A type of microprocessor — the brain that runs a computer — which packs the equivalent of two processors into a single chip. The best known dual-core processors in consumer computers are Intel’s Core 2 Duo and Core Duo, but rival AMD also makes them. They are a good bet for most people.

Flash Player: A small-capacity digital music player, like Apple’s iPod Nano and Shuffle. These players use flash memory, a type of memory chip that behaves like a small hard disk to store music, photos and videos. Larger players, such as the full-size iPod and the new Microsoft Zune, use actual hard disks, like the ones in computers. Flash memory is also what’s inside the small memory cards used in digital cameras.

HDMI: This acronym, for High-Definition Multimedia Interface, describes a new kind of cable for hooking high-definition TVs to things like cable boxes and DVD players. It provides a high-quality digital feed, and combines both audio and video signals via a single connection. When shopping for an HDTV, make sure it has HDMI connectors on the back.

HSDPA: An awkward name for a new high-speed cellphone network being deployed in the U.S. by Cingular Wireless. Its full name is High Speed Downlink Packet Access, and it’s intended to compete with successful high-speed networks from Verizon and Sprint called EVDO, or Evolution Data Only. All of these new networks allow Internet access at about the speed of a slow home DSL line, which is a big boost for cellphones. If you care about email and Internet access on a phone, and you are using Cingular, get a phone that can handle HSDPA.

Quad Band: A cellphone that handles all four bands, or frequencies, used in various countries by wireless phone companies adhering to a world-wide standard called GSM. Examples are Cingular and T-Mobile in the U.S., and Vodafone and Orange in Europe. A quad-band phone can be used on any GSM network anywhere, so if you travel overseas a lot, you may want one.

RAW: A file format for digital photographs that is uncompressed and largely unmodified by the camera’s chips, and therefore includes every detail of the color and image. It is prized by professional photographers and serious amateurs, who look for cameras and photo software that can handle the RAW format. But it produces enormous files, so most users should ignore it and stick with the very good, very common compressed photo format, called JPEG or JPG.

Shared Memory: A computer configuration in which the video circuitry lacks its own dedicated memory and must share, or drain off, a portion of the computer’s main memory. This is common in lower-price computers. It’s fine, but it reduces the amount of memory available to the nonvideo functions of the computer, so you may want to add extra memory to a PC of this type.

WAN: Any wide-area network, such as a cellphone network, that can be used to send and receive data. It is distinguished from a LAN, or local area network, such as the wired and wireless networks deployed inside a business or home. Some computer makers use the term for the built-in cellphone modems in their laptops.

Good luck with your gift shopping. Don’t get trapped in the tower of babble.

Email me at mossberg@wsj.com.

That’s the issue with the Sansa Rhapsody, the latest portable music player to challenge Apple’s iPod hegemony. This is the first player to be specifically designed to work with RealNetworks’ Rhapsody music-subscription service, and it’s no mere iPod clone. The player, made by SanDisk, is designed to show off the Rhapsody music-rental model, which is about music discovery rather than individual song or album purchases.

Sansa Rhapsody

Like other subscription services, Rhapsody charges a monthly fee for unlimited access to millions of songs. You don’t actually own these songs, and any music you’ve rented and downloaded from Rhapsody becomes unplayable if you stop paying the monthly fee, which is $14.99 a month if you want to hear the music on both a PC and on a portable device.

But Real believes that for people who love to try new artists or hear “channels” of music, this is better than buying individual songs and albums that never expire, which is Apple’s model. It stresses quantity and variety, and for the new Sansa Rhapsody player, it drives this message home by filling the devices with music. You can play this music free for up to two months before you have to buy a subscription.

Microsoft’s forthcoming Zune player will also come loaded with a small sampling of music, but the Sansa Rhapsody goes much further. On the base, 2-gigabyte model, fully half of the storage capacity is taken up with preloaded music. On the higher-capacity models, which feature up to 8 gigabytes of total storage, 2 gigabytes is taken up with preloaded music.

The Rhapsody service itself also has been overhauled, with a new, cleaner interface. Best Buy stores will be launching a store-branded version of Rhapsody and sell the new player.

I’ve been testing a Sansa Rhapsody player for the past week or so. I’ve compared the player with Apple’s midrange iPod Nano, the closest iPod model in size and capacity. The base-model, 2-gigabyte Rhapsody player I tested is a bit cheaper: $140 versus $150 for the 2-gigabyte Nano.

The Sansa Rhapsody isn’t really new hardware. It’s a variation of existing SanDisk players, and is formally called the e200R series. But this isn’t just a marketing gimmick. Unlike previous players that worked with Rhapsody, which relied on Microsoft software, this uses Real’s own music formats and copy-protection software and is more tightly tied to the service. The player can be switched into Microsoft mode for use with Microsoft files.

Personally, I found the preloaded music more of a hassle than a boon. It included both canned playlists and channels — preprogrammed radio stations. They featured numerous artists and genres I didn’t like, or actually hated, and I was forced to delete most of them and replace them with music I wanted to hear.

Before I could do this, however, I was amazed to find that Rhapsody wanted to keep adding its own choices to my player. The minute I plugged it into my PC, the service began downloading 73 songs of its own choosing to the Sansa, to “refresh” the choices that came on the device. Real says it plans to change this behavior to ask users first whether they want such a refresh.

The player itself is small, black and good looking. It has two big advantages over the iPod Nano. First, it has a larger screen, allowing for a better display of album art and text. Second, it has a replaceable battery.

But in most other respects, the Sansa Rhapsody is inferior to the iPod Nano. It is bulkier — more than twice as thick and almost twice as heavy as the Nano. It doesn’t have a feature for playing audiobooks or podcasts, and its battery life is lower than the Nano’s. I also found transferring music to the player from Rhapsody to be slower than on the iPod, despite Real’s claims to the contrary. And when I added my own tracks to the Sansa, it failed in many cases to display the album art.

Also, after the initial 60 days, you must plug the player into your computer and synchronize with the Rhapsody service at least once a month to verify that your subscription is paid up. Otherwise, all the songs on the device become unplayable. (Rhapsody also sells nonexpiring tracks a la carte, like Apple, but that’s not its main business.)

The player does a good job of displaying photos and videos, but getting them onto the device was more of a hassle than on the iPod. You need separate software, and that software was confusing to use.

For people who don’t want to choose their own music, or who value discovering new artists over hearing familiar ones, the Sansa Rhapsody may be just the ticket. For those who place a higher value on personal choice, the iPod is better.

• Email me at mossberg@wsj.com.

This latest iPod was publicly revealed yesterday at a razzle-dazzle marketing event orchestrated by Apple CEO Steve Jobs. But I have been testing a nano for the past few days, and I am smitten. It’s not only beautiful and incredibly thin, but I found it exceeds Apple’s performance claims.

Apple’s iPod nano

In fact, the nano has the best combination of beauty and functionality of any music player I’ve tested — including the iconic original white iPod. And it sounds great. I plan to buy one for myself this weekend, when it is due to reach stores in the U.S., Europe and Asia.

Available in classic iPod white, or a lustrous black (my favorite), the nano is not only small, it’s stunningly skinny — about the thickness of five credit cards stacked on top of one another. That means it can be carried easily in even the snuggest of clothing and the smallest of purses, and worn comfortably during exercise. You could even carry it in a wallet, if you were sure you wouldn’t sit on it.

Yet the nano, which starts at $199 in the middle of the iPod range, contains key features previously available only on the largest, costliest iPods. These include a sharp color screen, the ability to display the album covers for the songs it’s playing, and the ability to store a user’s photos and display them in slide shows accompanied by music.

Also, despite its small size, the nano holds plenty of songs and can play them for a long time. The base $199 model has two gigabytes of storage, which Apple says can hold 500 songs. A second model, at $249, has four gigabytes of storage and can hold 1,000 songs, Apple claims. The company says this slip of a player somehow packs in a large enough battery to play continuously for 14 hours.

In my tests, I found that the nano’s battery lasted a bit longer than Apple claims — 14 hours and 18 minutes. And I was easily able to pack around 1,200 songs, plus a couple dozen photos, into the $249 model, because most older pop and rock tunes tend to be shorter than the notional song Apple uses to calculate capacity.

In a second test, I loaded the entire 16-hour unabridged audio version of “The Da Vinci Code” onto my test four-gigabyte nano and still had room left over for 1,128 songs, plus my 24 photos, a couple of podcast episodes and about 50 contacts copied from my computer’s address book. That’s more than enough material for most people, even if it doesn’t compare with the 15,000 songs or up to 25,000 photos that Apple says its $399 full-size iPod can hold.

Apple is also shipping some optional accessories for the nano, including colored rubber covers, called “tubes,” an armband and a desktop dock. But the coolest accessory is a $39 lanyard with earbuds built-in at the neck. I found it to be perfect not only for exercising, but for walking around with the nano.

Overall, in my tests, the iPod nano performed as advertised, or better. I found no significant flaws or downsides. The only quirks are that the headphone jack is on the bottom, because there isn’t room for it on the top; and to make room for the jack, the standard iPod connector port that hooks up to many accessories has been placed off-center. But neither of these oddities matters much. In fact, the bottom-mounted headphone jack makes the optional lanyard earbuds possible, and keeps the screen oriented properly when you’re wearing them.

Despite its small size, the nano sounded as good as any other iPod, and is packed with plenty of audio power. Plugged into my car speakers, it was able to belt out the new Fountains of Wayne rocker, “Maureen,” loudly enough to be heard perfectly, even though I was going 70 mph in a convertible with the top down.

The nano replaces the wildly popular iPod mini, which had been Apple’s smallest full-feature iPod. When the mini came out in February 2004, it seemed incredibly small and sleek compared with the original iPod, which itself seemed amazingly small compared with its competitors.

But the nano is 62% smaller than the iPod mini, is half as thick and weighs less than half as much. Yet it holds as many songs as the base model mini. The four-gigabyte nano costs $50 more than the mini of the same capacity, but it is even more stylish and easier to carry, and it includes a color screen where the mini’s was monochrome. It also displays the album title for every song you play, which the mini omitted.

This combination of small size, good battery life and healthy capacity is made possible by the fact that the nano stores its music and photos on slim, small chips called flash memory modules, instead of the hard disks used by most earlier iPods. Flash memory not only takes up less room than a hard disk does, but it uses less power and isn’t as susceptible to skipping due to motion, or damage from drops.

In fact, during my tests, I dropped the nano several times, deliberately, from a height of about 3 feet, and it didn’t miss a beat. I also wore it around my neck on the lanyard during a couple of hours of pounding treadmill exercise, and it never skipped or froze.

There are dozens of small, flash-based music players, but I haven’t seen any that combine the nano’s size and features. These features include the relatively large, 1.5 inch high-resolution color screen; Apple’s famous iPod navigation wheel; and the standard iPod connector port, which links to numerous iPod accessories. Most flash players have tiny screens that are hard to read, lousy navigation and few or no accessories.

Apple’s low-end iPod, the shuffle, which is even smaller than the nano and remains in the lineup starting at $99, is also a flash player. But it is barely a true iPod, because it lacks a screen, the scroll wheel and the connector.

In my tests, the nano synchronized perfectly with both a Mac and a Windows PC running Apple’s iTunes software, and I was able to easily buy songs from iTunes and play them on the nano.

The company introduced another flash-based player yesterday, but it’s not an iPod. It’s a phone called the ROKR, made by Motorola, that contains iPod-like software, made by Apple, for playing music. The phone, which Apple didn’t design, is chubby and lacks the iPod navigation wheel. And it holds just 100 songs. It’s essentially a huge iPod shuffle with a screen. (I’ll review the ROKR in a later column.)

Surely music-playing phones are a big part of the future of digital music, and Apple will be involved with more of them over time. But the company clearly considers the new iPod nano a much bigger deal for now. In fact, it hopes that the nano’s slender size and ample capacity will blunt the belief that people don’t want to carry a separate phone and music player.

All I can say is: It sure is small and it sure is cool.

• Email me at mossberg@wsj.com