So I bought an iPod Touch on Sunday, after having fiddled with Tom’s at the beach barbecue (which was SUPERB FUN if I do say so myself). Popped down to Waitrose and grabbed one, keeping in line with my mission to buy absurd expensive pointless things when hungover. Attempted to have steak, but they were full, so ended up having foods at a Wetherspoons. Got home and installed iTunes on my laptop and plugged it in. Windows detected an iPod. Ran iTunes to be told that I’d installed it incorrectly and to reinstall it if I wanted CD burning capabilities. I can live without that, so I clicked OK to be told “This iPod cannot be used because the required software is not installed. Run the iTunes installer to remove iTunes, then install the 64-bit version of iTunes”. I duly went to Apple’s website and discovered that there’s no 64bit version of iTunes. And no way to use iTunes/iPod Touch on Vista64...that was a good hour wasted. So I wandered to my desktop machine, which still has a very old copy of XP on it that I’ve failed to remember to delete yet. Booted it up, did all the security updates and shizz and then installed iTunes. Much to my surprise (no, really) it wouldn’t run. The iTunes.exe process was running happily but no GUI. Uninstalled, reinstalled, but to no avail. Uninstalled it and Quicktime, scrubbed my registry of anything Apple related and reinstalled. Nada. Gave up and plugged it into TJs iMac, which was enough to bring the iPod Touch to life (for no apparent reason it needs to be plugged into iTunes before it’ll operate, even if you don’t put any music on it). jailbreakme.com in Safari exploits a HUGE security hole in both the iPod touch and iPhone in its TIFF handling - basically allowing a malicious user to write anything they want to your phone. In this case it’s a jailbreaker and an installer which then patches the vulnerability for you. Jailbreaking? What’s that? I hear you ask. Simply put, a jail is a way of making software run in a self contained area of your computer. So the iPod only knows about this self contained area and all the system stuff sits elsewhere out of harm’s way. If you force the iPod touch to “break out” of its jail you can then install whatever you want on it. Frankly, I paid for the thing, even if Apple don’t like it I’m gonna do what I want with it. I bought it because it could be jailbroken, not because I think iPods are any good (more of that later...) After visiting the site, you end up with Installer.app on your “springboard” (think Desktop with stupid name). So I spent the afternoon installing random things (colloquay - irc client that didn’t work very well, terminal, ssh, labrynth - an accelerometer based rolling ball game, etc). Took it to work with some CDs in the morning - part of our work PC builds is iTunes so I know it’ll work on my laptop. Plugged it in, discovered there’s a software update, unplugged it, rooted about a bit, ran the necessary files so as not to kill the jailbrokenness after the update, installed the update, patched it and copied my first CD onto it. Only a mere 20 hours after I first purchased it. Good points It’s beautiful. It’s very slick. When jailbroken it’ll do pretty much anything Integration with iTMS is very well done. Took me about 2 mins including download time to get an album. It’s shiny The web browsing’s surprisingly easy using safari Installer.app lets you install stuff from remote repositories in much the way yum or apt do - it stays up to date and alerts you of updates. You can install Apple’s iPhone apps on it (although this is NAUGHTY and SHOULDN’T BE DONE - bad me!) It’s an Intel XScale processor running at somewhere between 400 and 450mhz. It has 128meg ram (unlike most PDAs it actually has its own memory instead of using flash memory, which makes it faster). It has a screen resolution of 480x360. Now, my Palm TX is almost the same spec (450mhz xscale, 128meg