It was free, so why not. Whilst I’m not quite at the stage of drinking the kool-aid, I have some respect for Apple products and was pretty keen to get my hands on iBooks. I’ve been umming and ahhing about splashing out for an iPad (I know, I know. I slated them earlier) or an iPhone 4 for some time. So could IOS4 on the Touch negate the need for the expenditure?
In a word. No.
So what does IOS4 bring me on my second gen iPod TOuch? Quite simnply, six things. Five of which are reasonably fun. One of which is a total deal breaker.
One:
Folders. Actually pretty useful. I’ve had the Touch for a while now and, subsequently, have quite a few apps installed on it. I’d got to the point of having to wander through six screens of apps to find the one I wanted – which was getting a little tiresome.
The folders feature allows me to group apps into folders meaning, in my case, that I can now get all my apps onto one screen. The downside is that each folder is limited to twelve apps (you can see “games” and “games2” on my screen) which is slightly annoying. 
The way that the folders are portrayed though is very good. I can see (if I peer closely) the app icons in the folder and, when updating an app, the status bar appears underneath the folder – cumulative if there are several apps in one folder being updated.
So folders, all in all, a pretty good result.
Two:
Unified email. I’m a little more sceptical about this one. As you can see, I have three email accounts set up on my Touch. IOS4 gives me the first option of “All Inboxes” which unifies all emails into a single inbox. I can still access the accounts separately I suppose, but I’m not altogether sure of the benefit of the unified box.
I also have the option to thread messages within the inbox – which is slightly more useful. 
Here you can see the options within the mail settings.
One groovy feature of IOS4 is that any dates or contacts within the body of the emails will automatically launch their respective apps. So I can tap on a date in an email and instantly create a calendar entry.
Three:
Eye-candy. I can apply wallpapers all over the place if I want to. Great. Very reminiscent of OS/2 and totally pointless. Thank you Apple.
Four:
Different Album view. See above. It looks nice enough, but I won’t be running naked down the street singing it’s praises.
Five:
iBooks. Well, yes, I’ve now got iBooks on the Touch – that much I’ll admit. As you can see from this screen capture though 
, it’s slightly less than totally useless.
The app itself is veeeeerrrrrryyyyyy slow with a significant lag in performing any actions.
More show-stopping though, is the fact that you’d need to turn over about three thousand pages of iBook text just to read a copy of the Beano.
Six:
Saving the most critical and significant change that IOS4 brings to last;
IOS4 will absolutely hose your battery on a 2nd Gen iPod Touch. I’m a pretty heavy user of my little pocket-friendly, slim and funky friend. I can generally go a couple of days without any need for a significant re-charge, unless I’m on a plane – where I leave it plugged in to the underseat charger.
Since installing IOS4, I can’t even get a single days charge out of the thing. I will turn it off in the evening with 80% charge left (after an evening re-charge) and, seven or eight hours later when I wake up, it’s drained to ten percent.
Before anyone writes in trying to help – yes, I do purge the battery every couple of weeks. So that isn’t going to help.
It’s infuriating. Bearing in mind the 2nd Gen doesn’t support IOS4’s multi-tasking, just what in the hell is it doing – whilst locked and inactive – that is plundering the battery?
Verdict:
RagingAardvark says don’t bother. I’m going to back my Touch out to version three. You can get hold of the firmware from here (http://www.iclarified.com/entry/index.php?enid=757) if you’re in the same boat as me.
My birthday is coming up soon. And I’m going to surprise myself with a 64Gig iPad. I run Joikuspot premium on my N97 mini – so I won’t need the 3G version.
My oh my, I wish I could have been at the post-launch party of the iPad. It must have been like attending a wedding reception where the bride has been jilted at the altar; “You look absolutely lovely darling. So where are you going on your hon ……. ah …… ummmm …… errrr ….. more tea vicar?”
In fact, Stevo’s speech must have been just as good. I imagine it to have been a little like the opening scene of The Party – with Peter Sellers.
After all the hype and speculation, Apple have launched ……….. a big iPod Touch. Absolutely inspired! No multi-tasking, no video-conferencing, no 3G (unless you pay extra), no physical keyboard (unless you pay extra). All that, and a hefty price-tag for a staggering 16Gig of storage. It’s got a ten-inch screen – which doesn’t fold. So, if you’d like to try the experience of an iPad and only spend twenty quid doing it, visit your local home store, buy a twelve-inch mirror, chuck it in your back-pack and see how long it lasts.
Even the normally vociferous fan-bois are strangely mute – and that must be saying something.
Maybe I was being naive, but I was looking forward to a true road-warrior piece of kit. All I can do on my Touch, with web-cam chatting, multi-tasking, 3G/Wifi – always connected and proper MS Office integration. I could have lived without the keyboard, and I would have gladly paid the Apple premium for the product. I mean, how hard can it be?
We’ve had the Nokia N97 (close, but no cigar), the Nokia N900 (a “computer” with some phone functionality), Sony Ericsson’s latest attempts (piss-poor OS and battery life). Someone, somewhere out there must be able to produce this “Netbook killer”.
We got our youngest a Netbook for Christmas; OK, it’s got Windows XP home on it at the moment, but it multi-tasks, runs flash in the browser (and any other plugin you’d like), has Office 2007, integrated web-cam, key board that even my lumbering fingers can use, folds in half to protect it when not in use, has a five-hour battery life and only cost two-hundred quid.
There’s a football (soccer to you Americans) chant, the second line of which is “and you know you are”, and this – sadly – applies to Stevo here. Yes, I know that Apple have a reputation of launching a hobbled product and then “upgrading” it a year later to what it should have been in the first place (iPhone. I’m looking at you), but even the most die-hard fan-boi would struggle to justify this one. With previous products, when whipped out in public we derided them but secretly yearned for one. With this baby though, it will just be “Oh. You’re one of the dicks who lobbed out for a big iPod Touch”.
This could go on – and is all over the internet – but I have to go. I’ve got some fan-bois to bait.
Ξ October 13th, 2009 | → 1 Comments | ∇ iPod |
Well, this is something that I get every time I apply an update to the firmware on the iPod Touch and, first time it happened – a mere half a day after I got the thing – I was more than a little gutted. I’d been playing with the little baby for a couple of hours, had fallen in love and was now faced with an apparently bricked piece of hardware.
First off, the error itself. As an Ubuntu user, I was running iTunes in an XP VM – which was working fine and dandy – under VMWare Player. This, in fact, was the only thing that didn’t work and – for what it’s worth – you’ll get exactly the same error under Virtualbox. It seems to be a timeout in the USB layer – I’m guessing that the firmware update is a little more rigorous than the day-to-day iTunes type stuff that goes on.
As luck would have it, I’ve got an old box with XP on it lying around. You’ll need to get all your odds and sods onto this box so take these following steps ;
- Install the latest version of iTunes on your old standalone (or a friend’s) XP box. (Assuming that you’ve got the latest version on your non-functioning copy)
- Pop into \Documents and Settings\<your name>\Application Data (This is a hidden directory) on the broken box and copy the “Apple Computer” folder and then paste it over the same one on your recovery box.
- Fire up iTunes on the recovery box and plug in your iPod.
- iTunes will detect an iPod in recovery mode and ask you if you want to fix it.
- As part of copying all that gubbins over, the firmware update will be there too – this will be applied when the iPod is restored.
- Once everything is up and running on the recovery box (this may take some time), unplug the iPod from the recovery box.
- Fire up iTunes on the original box and plug in the iPod. The backup that you took just before the update will now be restored to the iPod and all will be well again.
Rinse and repeat every time you have to update the firmware.
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