
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.













Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
9-14-2007 @ 5:04PM
Halopend@gmail.com said...
Um, you mean you'll be posting more info here as you play with it?
Reply
9-14-2007 @ 5:14PM
Alistair said...
Don't you mean the iPod Touch?
Reply
9-14-2007 @ 5:14PM
Taylor said...
iPhone touch? May want to fix the title. :x
Reply
9-14-2007 @ 5:27PM
Martyn said...
Can you look at .mac Mail access via Safari please?
Reply
9-14-2007 @ 5:32PM
Jon Stieglitz said...
Hey Erica,
Any chance you could make a dictionary program for the iPhone- I was thinking of one just like the dictionary widget on dashboard.
Thanks
Reply
9-14-2007 @ 5:39PM
Josh said...
.Mac mail doesn't work in Safari on iPod touch.
Reply
9-14-2007 @ 5:51PM
justblaize said...
Erica, there have been reports of iPods with faulty screens and slow syncinc. Can you confirm this?
Reply
9-14-2007 @ 5:55PM
Reg said...
Countdown begins for total Touch pwnage. Erica rulez!
What's the bet that Google Maps, Weather and Calendar entry are running by Sunday?
Reply
9-14-2007 @ 5:58PM
Brian Mullally said...
My new touch is stuck in some test mode, check out the pics
http://www.wdkx.com/show_article/2007/09/14/My_New_iPod,_Broke_Already.html
Reply
9-14-2007 @ 6:04PM
Keno.White said...
So I grabbed the nano three days ago... And then I saw the touch in the store today, and could not resist. Back goes the nano, and now I'm officially the first person in this city to have an iPod touch 16GB.
First impression? Gorgeous. Best user interface for any portable device ever. If Steve wanted to bring back the PDA idea, Apple would nail it quite hard. A Newton with this sort of interface would simply rock.
I'm happy. It was expensive, but I'm happy.
Reply
9-14-2007 @ 6:07PM
Brian Mullally said...
Mine is offically broken. Apple wants me to return it. When I got it, it was in test mode, never left, and after they tried a bunch of things, it won't turn on. Check out the pictures I linked here.
http://www.wdkx.com/show_article/2007/09/14/My_New_iPod,_Broke_Already.html
Reply
9-14-2007 @ 6:09PM
Chris said...
Erica, is that a Leopard screenshot? Or maybe you have a really large display? Not to nitpick, but the shadow in the screenshot looks somehow.. odd to me. :)
Reply
9-14-2007 @ 6:19PM
Devon said...
My touch won't synch with iTunes; my computer thinks it's a camera and tries to launch iPhoto. Any thoughts, anyone?
Reply
9-14-2007 @ 6:57PM
Ondra Soukup said...
run the nmap again, just better this time :P
nmap -sS -p 1-65535 -vv
Reply
9-14-2007 @ 7:00PM
Tom said...
Playing with your new toys is NOT "LIVEBLOGGING".
WTF is up with the "blogophere" and this self-important trend of inventing zillions of new terms to describe things that other people have done for a long long time?
Reply
9-14-2007 @ 7:02PM
ontheriversedge said...
Can you use the keyboard for data entry on websites such as library catalogs... del.icio.us...gmail?
Thanks!
Reply
9-14-2007 @ 7:05PM
Ondra Soukup said...
@ontheriversedge:wtf ? why not ?
Reply
9-14-2007 @ 7:21PM
Tom said...
P.S. Your nmap scan only covers the well known port numbers. Try a full scan, mDNSResponder is running on a high port number on the iPhone, I wouldn't be surprised if it's the same on iPod Touch.
http://insecure.org/nmap/man/man-port-specification.html
Reply
9-14-2007 @ 7:59PM
ticked off said...
I tested out the dotmac and it worked for me. It crashed safari a couple of times
Reply
9-14-2007 @ 8:31PM
Paul said...
> Diagnostic Information. I keep saying: "No" and "Don't ask again
Please say "Yes" and "Don't ask again". It costs you nothing. Apple does actually read those you know.
Reply