iPod Nano's Coolest Feature Was Removed After Just One Year

In September 2009, Steve Jobs took the stage to unveil the fifth-generation iPod nano with a notable new feature: a built-in video camera.

Jobs said that portable video cameras were becoming increasingly popular, particularly due to YouTube, and an iPod nano with a video camera was Apple's attempt at expanding its presence in that market. It was the first iPod with a video camera, and it arrived just months after Apple released the iPhone 3GS as the first iPhone with video recording.

"iPod nano is the world's most popular music player with over 100 million sold," said Jobs, in a press release announcing the fifth-generation model. "And now we've added a video camera to its incredibly thin design, without any additional cost to the user."

With merely a 0.3-megapixel camera, the quality of video recorded with the iPod nano was obviously very low by today's standards. In a recent YouTube video, however, Becca Farsace explained how the imperfectly blurry videos add an element of nostalgia and make the iPod nano her favorite video camcorder.

Sadly, Apple released the sixth-generation iPod nano without a video camera just one year later, which makes the fifth-generation model quite unique. Apple also released the first iPod touch model with a video camera that year.

In the end, the iPod nano with a video camera lives on as a neat little chapter in Apple's history.