hertenberger.co.za

I’m waiting for some news regarding my dead iPod Touch from the local iStore. Since it died two dies prior to our departure from Australia, I had the chance to run to the nearest Target to pick up one of the new generation iPod Touch units as a replacement. Can’t approach a 28 hour journey without entertainment in hand!

The new 32GB unit is a marked improvement over my first generation 16GB Touch, and that has nothing to do with the double capacity the new unit provides. First off, my Touch constantly had a drained battery and had to be charged almost daily to avoid an incapacitated gadget. The second generation unit has been charged only a few times and happily keeps on running for hours. There’s no nasty shock of not having the unit power on, either.

Overall, the second generation Touch simply feels more robust from a software point of view and the inclusion of volume controls and an external speaker doesn’t hurt either. Best of all, the 3.5mm stereo jack means I no longer need to carry around the conversion cable. I used the Touch extensively throughout the flight and transit from Australia, not bothering to upgrade the preloaded 2.1 firmware with the newer 2.2.

Upgrading the firmware on the iPod is generally a simple affair, though I cannot understand why every download in iTunes, except for the firmware software is under control of a download manager. It was a frustrating exercise restarting the broken download of the 240MB 2.2 firmware upgrade and seeing it reset its size to 0. Eventually, I was determine to find another way of getting the firmware update downloaded, and happened to find this link. Provided are URL‘s for the direct download of the firmware files, allowing you to use a regular download manager to prevent the download from dying halfway through. Once downloaded, there’s a very simply trick to get iTunes to recognize the file that was manually downloaded. Simply launch iTunes and connect the iPod, then wait for everything to settle down. Click on the iPod description in the left-hand pane of iTunes, then hold down the alt key and click the Update button.

iTunes will permit you to browse to the location of the downloaded file and will continue with the firmware upgrade. This is a great trick if you are using a single machine to upgrade multiple iPods.

The procedure should work for any iPod and the iPhone, provided you are able to find the direct download URL. Felix Bruns’ website is one of the better resources I’ve found to help select the relevant download link.