Mom-to-3 said:
Can they all use the same charger that is plugged into a USB port? Do you just lay the Nano on top of your hard drive tower?
What about the automatic synching? How will that work with 3 Nanos? (Honestly, I don't understand the synching thing).
Thanks.
They will each come with a charger that plugs into a USB port. You can also purchase a charger that plugs into an electric outlet. My youngest DD has a speaker system for her ipod that charges it at the same time as it is playing.
When we go on vacation, we usually only take one (electric outlet) charger with us and share it between us.
The software that manages the music and the ipods is called itunes. You can download songs from the internet or from CDs you own onto itunes, which converts the MP3 files to the format that ipods use. About 90% of the music on my ipod was from CDs I already owned.
We have 3 ipods that are (or at least were) using the same computer. The computer recognizes each ipod (we have 3 ipod minis and the computer even puts up the correct color icon when each ipod is attached - I have a teal mini, youngest DD has a pink one and DH has silver). Each ipod has its own "name" and it's kind of cute to see the little color icon with the correct name under it. That's on a mac though; I don't know if a PC is the same. In my experience with PCs, it might just show up as a "USB storage device".
All the music that you load onto the computer is put into the "Library" and then, each ipod user chooses songs from the Library to put into their own playlist, which goes on their ipod.
When you first attach the ipod to the computer, the software asks whether you want to automatically synch the ipod to itunes. Not sure if that's exactly how it's asked, but the gist of it is whether you want to have new songs that were added to itunes automatically put onto your ipod. We chose not to do that and just manually add the songs we want from the Library into our playlists when we attach the ipod.
I prefer not to autosynch because there are some things that I downloaded to the computer on itunes that I don't necessarily want on my ipod. Here's a
link to the apple site about autosynching that explains a bit more.
Hope this is helpful. We don't have experience with nanos (other than that DD got one for her boyfriend for a Christmas/birthday gift). The nanos do scratch easily, especially the black ones (the body is made of the same stuff as ibooks are, which is a polycarbinate that they use over glass to make bulletproof glass. I haven't hear of denting, more cracking of the screen if people sat on them or had them in their pocket and had something like a seat belt tight against their pocket). Features to look for in a case are whether you can keep it on all the time - can you still use the dock on the bottom and the click wheel with it on?, does it have a clear cover for the screen? If they want to "attach" the ipod to themselves, some of the covers have lanyards or armbands.
Here's a
link to the apple ipod nano page.
When I saw 3 nanos I thought you meant those iddy bity bananas. 
Usually I'm the one misreading the titles of threads!
