Liveblogging the iPod Touch

Well, it's here. And here's all the dish on my first hours with the iPod Touch.

Impressions

Feel. Man, this thing definitely has a completely different feel and weight from the iPhone. It feels way way thinner.

Squeeze Control. It seems to be confirmed that the iPhone headset squeeze control does not work with the touch. I'll test when I have time.

Video Out. Does not work with the Belkin dock.

Audio jack. At the bottom!!?? Why?

Didn't work the first time. A lot of people are reporting flaky iTouch behavior. The first time I connected my new iTouch to iTunes, this was the error I got. Removing the USB and reconnecting it made it work.

Calculator. Same as iPhone. Absolutely the most boring accessory ever shipped.

Keyboard. All the sounds on the Touch are clickier and lighter than on the iPhone. It's a very palpable difference.

Safari. Works great--once you remember to switch on WiFi. All my Javascript bookmarklets are working fine.

Clock. There are a *lot* fewer sound effects to play with the built-in alarm, and since there's no speaker, you can only get alarmed through your headphones. No vibrate either. Sounds are: checkmate, jump, time passing, time's up, updown.

Cheerios! Brian Mulllally writes that the icon for the iTouch test mode serial number is, *hee*, a Cheerios box.

Diagnostic Information. I keep saying: "No" and "Don't ask again" but it keeps asking and asking and asking...

Hack after the jump...

Hacking

Join us. I'm chatting over at irc.osx86.hu on #iTouch.

User Agent. According to the iPhoneWebDev list, the iPhone user agent string is like the iPhone's with iPod instead of iPhone, with 420.1 instaed of 420+ for AppleWebKit and with 3A100a Safari instead of 1C28 Safari: Mozilla/5.0 (iPod; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420.1 (KHTML,like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/3A100a Safari/419.3

Visual Hub. TUAW reader RMS notes that Visual Hub 1.28 adds iPod Touch support.

Firmware. First up: Firmware. Get the iPod Touch restore files here. I'm downloading mine now.

iPhoneInterface 0.3.3 works. Not jailbroken and when I try to put files, I get "Problem with AFCFileRefOpen: 7". I can however see the main disk and the iTunes files in the public Media folder, presumably /var/root/Media.

Firmware again. The firmware images seem really similar to those used for 694-5259-38.dmg on the iPhone.

Recovery mode. Press & hold power button (that's on the top-left, not the top-right) AND Home button for about 25-seconds. New restore mode screen looks like USB cable pointing to iTunes icon.

Attempting Jailbreak. I got into recovery mode and am running jailbreak with the original iPhone firmware. Doesn't seem to be working. Confirmed as not working, unfortunately.

The hunt for the firmware password. There's an ongoing hunt, looking for the key to the encrypted firmware. Running strings on the dmgs did not work for me.

Leaving Recovery Mode. The iTouch makes it easy to leave recovery mode. Press and hold just the power button for about 5-10 seconds until the iPod powers off. Then tap it again to restart.

Ping & ssh. On the off chance that Apple would be kind, I first pinged my iTouch (works, as expected) and tried ssh (connection refused, as expected).

Disk Use. I see nothing about disk use anywhere. Looks like a no go at this time.

nmap. As follows:

% ./nmap -v 192.168.0.103



Starting Nmap 4.22SOC6 ( http://insecure.org ) at 2007-09-14 16:40 MDT

Initiating Ping Scan at 16:40

Scanning 192.168.0.103 [1 port]

Completed Ping Scan at 16:40, 0.13s elapsed (1 total hosts)

Initiating Parallel DNS resolution of 1 host. at 16:40

Completed Parallel DNS resolution of 1 host. at 16:40, 0.10s elapsed

Initiating Connect() Scan at 16:40

Scanning 192.168.0.103 [1705 ports]

Increasing send delay for 192.168.0.103 from 0 to 5 due to max_successful_tryno increase to 4

Completed Connect() Scan at 16:40, 20.35s elapsed (1705 total ports)

Host 192.168.0.103 appears to be up ... good.

All 1705 scanned ports on 192.168.0.103 are closed



Read data files from: .

Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 20.639 seconds

% ./nmap -sT -p 1-65535 192.168.0.103



Starting Nmap 4.22SOC6 ( http://insecure.org ) at 2007-09-14 16:49 MDT

Interesting ports on 192.168.0.103:

Not shown: 65533 closed ports

PORT      STATE    SERVICE

49928/tcp filtered unknown

62078/tcp open     unknown



Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 563.261 seconds





http://www.hacktheipodtouch.com/unlock/ipod-touch/how-to-jailbreak-the-ipod-touch

I doubt. I think this is just speculation here. We're trying it out--but it's really unlikely to work. Confirmed: Doesn't work.