I recently bought 16 Gb version of iPod Touch (1st gen) on eBay. What a fun little device. After 2.0 firmware you can install all kinds of fun applications and many are free! Despite all the cool factor of this very useful little gadget, I had a ton of complains about it's software limitations (music player for one is lobotomized: almost zero tweaks, just 4 dumb buttons and volume which is impossible to control precisely). But my today's blog is not about this. New version of iPod touch came out last week, and I couldn't resist it. It had few useful things that 1st player was missing. Namely actual physical volume buttons and built in speaker. I see many people don't understand what speaker is for, but I think it's a must! I'm not talking about blasting music on the train, no. When I'm at home I'm using it too, and I don't want to play games with my headphones on. Want to show cool video clip to your friends without sharing ear infection? :) There you go. Like to use alarm clock but don't want to sleep in the headphones? Very useful! And now calendar reminders finally make sense. Don't get me wrong, I'd still use headphones to listen to the music or watch movies on the train/plane.
There's however a HUGE bug in the 2nd Gen iPod Touch, and it's a deal breaker. Get this, WiFi DOES NOT WORK with many routers that use WPA/WPA2 security. Actually it's a bug in 2.1.1 firmware and it also affects 1st gen iPods. Difference is that you can't use older firmware on the new iPod. I spent about 3 hours, torturing my D-Link 4300 router, trying all kinds of settings and combinations, changing WPA password, no matter what I did it would not connect. Every other WiFi device I have works flawlessly. When I disabled wireless security, iPod was able to connect, but it's not an option. I went to apple forums, and it's a riot out there, so many people are having this issue. Someone suggested to do a Network Reset (it's an option in iPod settings). Surprisingly it helped me connect to my network once, and then it was no go again. I hope Apple is paying attention. If firmware is not fixed, I'm returning my iPod within a week...
Besides firmware bug, there's another issue with new iPod Touch. It seems they changed something so older chargers no longer work! I had no problems using my really old Apple made AC charger from 4th Gen iPod until I got new iPod Touch. Even 1st gen worked. Now it displays "Charging device is not supported" or similar message. It's not a huge deal to me, but people who bough $300+ Bose docking systems feel the pain... I wonder if there was any technical reason Apple did this, are they just being @ssholes and trying to squeeze more money out of consumer by making us buy new chargers...
Oh yeah one more thing. New iPod includes Nike + transceiver chip. Sorry but I have strong optionion about this one... I mean they actually had a chance to include bluetooth chip, but chose some proprietary technology that less than 3% of us use so some overpriced sneakers can now talk to the iPod. Instead we could've used wireless bluetooth headphones, or a bluetooth GPS reciever, maybe even a keyboard. Thanks alot Steve.
But what can you do. With GPS and Bluetooth iPod touch would've been COMPLETE. Since we don't live in the perfect world, I'm accepting what I have, proiding WiFi issue is fixed soon.
