cdrum

I’ve been back in Beijing for a few days and have had a chance to play with my new gadget, the iPod Touch. Here are some observations:

• I jailbreaked it. Currently at version 1.1.2 – waiting to upgrade to 1.1.3 until the jailbreak process is more fullproof. Here are my jailbreaking notes.
• It’s slick – nice interface, and Safari + Wifi makes it a nice toy while at the coffee shop.
• I am surprised why Apple decided to make 2 partitions – the first one is around 300 MB, the 2nd one, for lal your data, spans the rest of the storage (in my case, almost 8GB). The problem with this 300 MB limitation on the first partition is that is where the applications are installed to. I am already full! I have read though that people have simply moved the Applications folder to the other partition and created a symbolic link. I’ll try that today or tomorrow. But, why bother with 2 partitions?
• I wish it had Bluetooth (and consequently Bluetooth-enabled internet access). I’d love to be able to pair it with my mobile phone so I could access the Internet in the taxi. YES, I know that an iPhone is essentially this! But I didn’t buy an iPhone, did I?! (besides, unlocking would have been a pain, more expensive, etc.)
• The build quality and packaging is surpurb. Nice all-metal casing, glass scratch-resistant face – gadgets are getting somewhere!
• I haven’t gotten music and movies to sync properly yet with gtkpod or amarok. I’m following this guide, and am getting close! Will hopefully get this working soon. The files transfer, but the iTunes DB doesn’t get updated properly. But, I won’t be using this as my primary multimedia device. I want it primarily for these two reasons:
  • Internet Tablet
  • Big(ger) screen movie viewing during travel

Well folks, I think I have out done myself this time.

Really…

As some of you may know, I had to make an unexpected trip to the U.S. for a funeral. Well, I am currently on my way back to China – I am at the Minneapolis airport waiting for my flight to Narita.

Well, on the way to the lounge, I found this neet ZoomSystems vending machine selling ipods, among other things. Here’s a photo I borrowed from anoither website, click on the image to go to that Website.

Just for fun, I went to it and played around with the touch screen interface. Hmm, they have iPod Touch’s. It sure would be nice to watch my videos on that nice 3.5″ screen instead of the smaller 2.5″, or whatever it is, that I have on my 5G iPod Video… Hmm, the 8GB model is US$279.99… I figured I could transfer my videos over between the two iPods during my almost 3 hour layover. The plan was perfect!

A quick impulsive credit card swipe later, I was the new proud owner of the iPod Touch. And because it wasn’t an iPhone, it wouldn’t (or shouldn’t) have any nasty activation issues.

Ha!!

It turns out that this bloody thing REQUIRES you to “activate”, or initialize it using iTunes. And, of course, iTunes runs only on Windows and Mac.

The world is not fair for us freedom loving trouble makers…

Here’s a picture of my currently useless iPod Touch plugged into my old Appe PowerBook G4 running Ubuntu. Oh, the irony. I just had to have Linux on this thing, huh?

As you can see, it requests a connection to iTunes. Grrr…

So, I’m stuck not being able to use my new toy until AFTER my long flight – which was the main reason I bought it in the first place!

And here’s a random tidbit… For fun, I decided to scan the lounge for open bluetooth devices. Here’s a screenshot:

Steve is my phone, but it’s interesting to note the 3 computers with bluetooth and the 2 BlackBerrys. Is it normal for BlackBerry to have Bluetooth open? Maybe it’s those people with the stupid bluetooth ear pieces with the annoying “I’m Cool, But Not Really” blinking blue light…

Oh well, time to go to my plane…