I have had my ipod touch (2.2.1 firmware) now for almost two months and i have found it to be a great little gadget. Although i have continually been annoyed Apple’s efforts to cripple the applications available through the itunes app store eg no last.fm scrobbling, having to sync to itunes to retrieved episodes of subscribed podcasts.
Last week i decided enough was enough and the only way around the limitations from Apple was to jail break the gadget. I found a lot of the guides on the net easy to follow but it still seems a bit of an inexact science and i ran into plenty of issues. After first trying i had to lived with a bricked ipod for a few days until i could find the time again to fix it properly. First i tried Quickpwn this technique seemed to give me an error of the #1600 variety when trying to restore my custom firmware in itunes.
Next up i went with the RedSn0w 0.3 beta, this script was pretty smooth although after running it the ipod just seemed to reset into recovery mode again with no forward progress. I then tried Voltage reading around the net people seemed to be saying good things about this one, but alas it also let me down due to a bug, so refused to find my original Apple firmware.
By this stage i had wasted a lot of time and was starting to lose hope in ever finding freedom from the itunes appstore, that was until Quick Freedom. I restored my ipod back to it’s default state for what seemed like the 100th time ready to have my hope crushed by another 1600 error. But this time it was different i glanced down at my ipod whilst itunes told me “preparing ipod for restore” only to see the pengiun wallpaper i had selected when i created the custom firmware.
Another 15 minutes later and the custom install had successfully completed offering me the “installer” and “cydia” applications after rebooting. For anyone hoping to jail break their devices i give two pieces of advice. First although most of the youtube videos are only 10 minutes long showing how to jailbreak an ipod by the time you get all of the software together and find a method that will works for you. Be prepared to spend a huge amount of time getting it done. Second if a method dosent work for you return right back to the start with the default firmware before trying again. I found trying to charge ahead and skipping this step will only lead to failure and more wasted time.
Happy jail breaking!