Ok just hold on now. You use a scroll wheel and you keep your thumb moving in a circular area, and you continually make progress going up or down your list...there is no starting at the top or bottom on a touchscreen, flicking in the opposite direction to scroll, and then briefly stopping while you move your thumb or finger back up or down to repeat the process. There is wasted movement and not only that, it is herky jerky compared to a smooth pleasing circular motion. And I absolutely know what I'm talking about as I have wheel iPods and an iPad with the iPhones style iPod software. So I'm saYing since ya gotta use your thumb to navigate any nano one handed, then a scroll wheel is more efficient. Apple is putting on touch only to unify the interfaces on their devices, not because it is better or easier to use. It's a fair compromise for PDA functionality on iPhones and iPod touches...but theres no way in hell it's better for one handed music navigation on a small music device. Also, using two up down buttons for controlling volume sucks compared to the precision adjustment of the scrollwheel. Not sure why they don't implement a virtual scroll wheel.
Ok, you prefer the scroll wheel. I prefer touch. I think there is far less wasted movement. Not constantly scrolling through a list to find what you need. instead, touch a spot on the side bar to get to the general area, flick down a few spots, voila, there's my song!
Or just touch the menu you want, no scrolling and constantly moving my thumb to get to the menu I want. Even better is I can move the menus I move the most to the most convenient areas so I can just hit them and go. Not always having to scroll down to the bottom cause that's where they happened to put the menu I want.
The only thing I'd give you the scroll wheel is better for is volume, but even then I found it awkward sometimes. Put my hand on it to change volume, accidentally hit a button, and all the sudden scrolling didn't change volume but either was moving amongst my song list (cause I accidently put it back on that) or change my position in song (because it changed the mode from volume to scroll through the song). Which was really annoying when I was just trying to change volume without taking the nano out of my pocket. Which is why in the end I prefer hte remote with the volume buttons, since they are dedicated volume, I don't have to worry that they might change something else instead!
And I'm so glad they didn't do a virtual scroll wheel. All the annoyances of the scroll wheel without it's one big advantage (tactile feel) and the bad stuff of the touch screen (no tactile feel) combined! That's a horrible idea! The biggest advantage of the scroll wheel was the tactile feel. You get rid of that, you keep the fact you can't feel what you are doing with the touch screen but you keep the awkwardness of using the scroll wheel.
So, sorry, you may prefer the click wheel. Doesn't mean I don't find the touch screen far better to navigate. And really I prefer the remote on the headphones to the clickwheel. Really not a huge fan of the clickwheel in general.
And yes, I say this after the 3rd gen nano was my first ipod and I eventually got an iphone. I immediately preferred the iphone's ipod interface to find songs over the scroll wheel (but at the time apple did not have a remote for the iphone/touch so I still preferred having physical buttons for walking around which is why I kept the nano despite having a far better ipod player. I will say the nano is still superior for just walkign around or excercising, especially with it's newest incarnation, mainly cause of its size and form. Which Apple made far better in this newest version, and actually deproved when they moved away from the third gen form and back to the stick form).
