Jailbreak This, Zibri. And Screw You, Apple.
Last Christmas, I managed to snag myself an iPod touch (only 8gb). It was a rather rash decision based off my experiences with my friend’s iPod touch, and my really crappy Creative Zen Micro (It doesn’t take much to top one of them). I remember reading about the product’s offered by Archos, which seem to actually play media without having to send it through conversion after conversion of file formats first. But for some reason, I still got a Touch. It didn’t take me long to realize I made a really stupid decision.
My epiphany started when Apple released their “January Software Upgrade” for the “minor fee” of $20, and proceeded to dock the price of all new iPod Touch’s by $20 so the price would stay the same for all the new customers. While I did receive mine for Christmas, I also did pay for a lot of it. More than any person that bought in the last half of January. And all this upgrade did was put on software that Apple had already written for the iPhone, and decided to spend five minutes porting to the iPod touch. Needless to say, Apple didn’t get my $20.
Skipping ahead a month, I discovered the joys of WinAmp, and how it kicks the crap out of iTunes, which recently had decided to use up all of my old computer’s memory, and not always detect that my iPod was actually plugged in to my USB 2.0 PCMCIA adapter. I did come across the software upgrade after all, because of that friend I mentioned earlier. His iTunes screwed up, and he ended up with three software upgrades, and a $60 bill. So I took one, but in the process had to sync my iPod with his library, causing me to lose all of my songs. I then took it home, synced it with my library, and surprisingly the upgrade stayed. But not for long.
I thought that jailbreaking my iPod might improve it, because generally products are hacked to make them better. Big mistake on my part. This is the only hack I know that actually made a product worse. First, I had to do a firmware restore, which for some reason disabled the software upgrade. The actual jailbreaking with the ZiPhone application was easier enough, and it installed correctly on the first try. However because I no longer had the software upgrade, I couldn’t rearrange my home screen icons, so when I tried installing applications with the crappy installer program, they got put in random spots and in no order whatsoever. Then I discovered that all the applications are geared towards the iPhone, not iPod touch, and almost all require Internet, including iPong. Why the hell does pong need the ‘Net? It’s two balls that bounce back and forth.
So after I realized how crappy and annoying jailbreaking actually was, I decided to undo the jailbreak. All I had to do was hit “Lock” on the ZiPhone application. I figured it’d work just as well as unlocking it did. I was wrong. The re-locking got my iPod stuck in some in between locked and unlocked state where all it would do is display scolling white text and try to do something with BSD. Whatever it was trying to do wouldn’t work, so I just had a scrolling message that repeatedly told me that the iPod was attempting the command again, and then failing.
After digging through the help documents that came with ZiPhone, I realized that if I held my power and home buttons down for seven seconds together until the screen went black, and then waited two seconds and released the power button, then in theory the iPod should go into recovery mode and I should be able to reload the Apple firmware. An hour later, I finally managed to get that to work.
Overall, is the iPod touch nice? Yeah. Could it be a heck of a lot better? Definitely. Is iTunes better than Windows Media Player? Yes. But WinAmp still is ten times better. And Apple sure isn’t getting my money when I decide to get a new player. And don’t get convinced that jailbreaking is good. It’s a pain, and sucks on iPod touches. Use your time to hack an Xbox instead. That hack is actually worth it.
