Jailbreaking my iPod Touch, part one

I’ve had my iPod Touch for about three weeks now. It’s pretty cool and I’ve been using it a lot to watch videos mostly.

Sure, there are a fair few things that hack me off (more on that later), but on the whole it fulfils the purpose I bought it for – mainly to replace my PSP, which I had been using solely for video and web browsing. I wanted something lighter, and smaller, for the same purpose, with maybe some music thrown in.

So why not get an iPhone? Well, I use my Sony K750i’s camera a lot. And I mean a lot. I never carry a phone and a camera, so I’d need a replacement phone that did both as well as my K750i. The iPhone is many beautiful things, but a shit hot camera isn’t one of them. No zoom, no flash, no panoramic shots.

That’s the main reason why I got the touch. The other is, obviously, that I really, really, wanted one. I defy any one (especially a tech geek bloke) to walk into the Apple store and play with the touch and not immediately want one.

Anyway, I digress. As I mentioned earlier there are several things that annoy me about the iPod Touch. Lack of Flash support and Gmail/Maps not working properly in Safari are amongst the forerunners. I also would like a VNC client, Instant Messenger, Notes, a Text Editor and that cool Etch-a-Sketch app that serves no purpose whatsoever. Oh yeah and like everyone else, I think that Apple’s lack of customisation of the interface both sucks and blows.

It was, then, with keen anticipation that I read the stuff last week about a jailbreak for the 1.1.1 firmware. All I had to do was wait until someone made it Loz-proof to do, and away we go…

iJailbreak to the rescue

Today, Teak sent me an IM that contained a link to a Gizmodo article on iJailbreak. iJailbreak is written by a 13 year old kid (yes, thirteen) and jailbreaks an iPod Touch. Yeah you may be child geniuses, lads, but you’re shit at naming.

So with a bit of a flutter in my heart, I set about jailbreaking my iPod Touch. The process is easy as hell to do, but I had a few doubts during it. Should I force quite iTunes as soon as I connect my iPod for step two or should I leave it open? As it turns out it didn’t matter.

About fifteen or so minutes later, I had a hacked iPod. Straight into installer and tried to install a few applications, which I managed, though rather disappointingly Apollo IM kept giving me a ‘package size’ error.

VNC, Finder, Sketch and Summerboard all installed fine. Summerboard wouldn’t work properly though, placing the dock at the top of the screen. VNC worked, but I could only see an iPod Touch sized portion of my Mac Mini. Though I expected that, I didn’t expect not to be able to scroll around the window, like Mobile Windows versions. Amongst the apps is also a Calendar fix, which makes the iPod Touch calendar application function exactly like the iPhones (for better or for worse). Arsed? Not really, but some people will be.

So, now to put iPhone’s apps on it – Mail, Google Maps and Weather specifically. And that’s where the fun stopped. Try as I might I couldn’t get them to work, and launching them just locked the Touch up completely. After a few of these restarts, I got to seeing the Apple logo for longer time periods per restart. Eventually it refused to go anywhere else. With a heavy heart I admitted defeat and put the Touch into recovery mode. From there I restored it and will leave it as it is. Well until tomorrow probably when I will have another go…