iPod touch roundup. A lot going on with Apples new device.

Some quick notes on the iPod touch, now that it is in the hands of a lucky few. Macworld’s Chris Breen and Jason Snell state a few not so known facts about the device.

Manual management of media. Jason Snell points out in the latest Macworld Video that you can manually manage media with the iPod touch. The option for asking it to do so is found in the Summary tab of the iPod touch’s preferences. This means that, unlike with the iPhone, you can enable this option, connect the iPod touch to any computer, and drag media to it.

iPhone hacks don’t currently work. Among the first things I tried to do after unpacking my iPod touch was to run the AppTapp iPhone installer hack. It didn’t work. The installer ran and ran with nothing apparently happening. Against my better judgment I force quit the installer and my iPod touch would do nothing more than display its “Connect to iTunes” option. I fired up iTunes and it wouldn’t see the iPod touch.

Before panicking I plugged the iPod touch into a different Mac. That Mac recognized the iPod touch but told me that it was in recovery mode and that I needed to restore it. That I did. iTunes downloaded the iPod touch 1.0.1 software and then reformatted the iPod. It worked perfectly well after that.

 

iPod touch video is darker. My iPod touch’s video is noticeably darker than the video played on my iPhone. I synced Chinatown, purchased from the iTunes Store, on both devices and played the same scene on each. With brightness cranked all the way up on both devices, the iPhone (below, left) far outshone the iPod touch. Dark scenes on the iPod touch were really dark, making it a less-than-ideal vehicle for watching film noir.

 

More to come on the iPod touch. Read the full article here.