Santa was pretty good to Mr. Shoo this year and left enough Best Buy gift cards and cash to be able to get an iPod Touch. The Touch is very similar to the iPhone except that it’s not a phone, doesn’t have an external speaker, and doesn’t have bluetooth capability. What it does have is Wifi, photo slideshow, a web browser, about 8GB of storage, and it’s thinner than an iPhone. Not too shabby.
First thoughts:
Unlike Dave and his iPhone, I can manually manage my music, videos, and play directly from the iPod. Dave, something I did find out is that there is a 3rd party utility to copy your music from an iPod to your iTunes library if you use the Jailbreak hack (more on that later).
One of the first things I tried out was the web browser. Just unbelievable how easy it is to use. The browser allows for full page viewing of websites as well as modified mobile versions. Google has some iPhone/touch optimized pages for gmail, search, and calendar. With a double tap of the finger one can easily zoom in and check out a portion of a webpage. Of course, I checked out http://m.spfldbloggers.com first - and of course, I found out I need to fix a few features.
A neat thing that I can do from my touch since I am connected to the Internet via wifi is buy music from the iTunes library. Last night I bought my first album from iTunes while laying in bed half awake. It was way too easy. I clicked buy, entered my password and immediately after that I was automatically downloading new tracks to my iPod. The album also included some bonus features so as soon as I synced back with iTunes, iTunes started downloading new videos. All way too cool!
Jailbreak
Jailbreak is the method to get 3rd party apps installed on an iPhone / Touch. There are 100’s of tutorials out there so I thought I give one a shot. One of the first steps is to downgrade the firmware to 1.1.1. In 1.1.1 there is an exploit in the web browser to allow access to the root of the system so it’s possible to install applications. The Jailbreak software uses this exploit and then patches it right away. More info here.
CrunchGear has the easiest tutorial so far.
I gave it a shot tonight. Really easy to do. I installed a few apps under the 1.1.1 version, but when I went to upgrade to 1.1.2 I didn’t get the pre-installer for Jailbreak installed correctly so it reverted back to the factory settings. Eventually, I’ll try it again because it’s possible to get the same functionality from the iPhone of Google Maps and Email for the Touch that’s not currently included with the Touch.
So why didn’t you just get an iPhone?
Honestly, because I was worried about dropping a device that I would have so much invested interest into and having to pay for extra fees for mobile internet. You wouldn’t believe, but ol’ Shoo can be a bit clumsy at times. The rumor is that by June there will be a new 3G version of the iPhone and the current version will be out of date. And I guess the biggest reason why I didn’t get one was because somewhere in the iPhone contract there is small print that I must get a new puppy for GTG. Well, that’s what she keeps telling me.
Worth it?
Of course you could buy a Zune and be perfectly happy, but you wouldn’t have a kick ass UI (user interface) or a full internet browser. Yes, it’s worth it if you have the moola.
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