I thought I'd treat myself to an iPod touch. Being largely blinded by the shininess of it I didn't actually bother to see how well it worked under Linux. It turns out the answer is not at all — it doesn't even charge. Apple in their infinite wisdom have made it even more closed than previous iPods. Nice one Apple.
I can just about live without being able to use it as a mass storage device and needing a Mac or windows machine to organise music, but I do want to be able to charge it easily.
Anyway, a bit of Googling pointed me to someone who claims a module designed for charging the iPhone works but it didn't for me as the USB ID differs, but this patch fixes it.
As for the device itself it's rather nice. My main complaint (which was also one of the first questions a friend asked me about it) is how crippled the WiFi is. You can't download music via the wireless (e.g. download it from a website, rather than just listen within Safari), listen to streaming audio, stream to an AirPort Express (that would be really cool!) or connect to iTunes shares. It really feels like Apple are trying to keep it as closed as possible (I guess I shouldn't be surprised); You can only download music onto the device from the iTunes store and the only video site you can use is YouTube. About the only concession I can find is you can change the default search engine in Safari from Google to Yahoo.
It will be interesting to see how open the upcoming SDK is. I guess I could just root it anyway.
I just ran across the Cowon iAudio 7 today, which looks like a much friendlier device for those of us who feel no need to reward Apple's proprietary behavior.
