Running circles with Ipod Touch

I've recently bought one iPod Touch 16GB for my wife. A few days later I bought another one for my youngest kid (a clear case of iPod envy).

I was quite dissapointed when I've learned that the Touch did not support enterprise WPA nor it does include a VPN client. This renders it useless for any serious network use (so I'm not buying one for me till this is corrected). After the initial excitement my kid was kind of bored with the lack of new applications for his iPod Touch so he asked me to do something about it.

I was not eager to get into that fight, but I was told that Ziphone was a safe bet to install an application installer on the iPod Touch so new applications can be installed. They even claimed on their website that even a caveman can do it with Ziphone. So I decided to give it a go. 

I dowloaded the application to our iMac and selected Jailbreak. A few messages indicated that files were copied to the Touch and a message told me to wait 1'10''. Nothing happened for more than five minutes so the caveman inside told me to switch off the iPod, which I did. When I power it on again, a number of text lines appeared on the screen till a text repeated over and over like if it were a problem mounting a disk partition: BSD root: md0, major 2, minor 0.

Cool, now I've just lost my iPod and I am supossed to be even less skilled than a caveman. Googling led me to many people complaining about the same thing happening with 16GB Touchs while it was working ok for 8GB ones. 

Well, at least I learned that I could recover it using iTunes (once you are told that you need to attach it to the USB while you keep the home button pressed on the Touch). Then you can use iTunes to recover the original firmware but, bad news, your music is gone.

While I almost gave up, given the music was lost I decided to try again (it has to be the caveman inside). While some people suggested to press many times the Jailbreak button, the second attempt to use Ziphone did its magic on my freshly recovered iPod Touch 16GB (with 1.1.4 software) with the first click. 

Once the installer was in place my kid had a lot of fun installing various completely useless (but maybe geeky applications). Still no VPN client or enterprise WPA in sight. After several hours of fun my kid went to his computer to sync the iPod with his music library. I was a no go.

First he got an error 0xE8000001 as iTunes started. I've never seen that problem before but people on different forums mentioned that whe should kill iTunesHelper.exe and try again. That changed nothing. Others suggested it was due to a problem with the current iTunes install. After reinstalling iTunes the error dissapeared. 

Unfortunately the sync was a no event. No errors were shown but sync did not work. Did I mention all this was happening on a Windows XP PC? (now you know). Nothing of what we did helped us to fix the issue. It was getting late so I told my kid to go to bed.

Just to see what happen I connected the same iPod to our iMac and I was asked whether I wanted to clean the existing music (I do not know how you can do that when the device contains no music at all) and be synced with this computer's. I said yes but the sync-ing actually started here.  It would be ok if that was the right music library but it is not.

I still need to figure out how to get the device synced with the music library on the PC. Maybe it will work right away, who knows? Now I am sick and tired of such a lack of friendliness as soon as you do not follow Mr. Jobs paved road. Did I mention it's a toll road?

All we wanted was to be able to install (and later to remove) some silly apps on the device. We paid good money for the iPod. I think we are entitled to a bit more of respect Mr. Jobs.