{"id":385,"date":"2009-07-11T22:32:01","date_gmt":"2009-07-12T02:32:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/?p=385"},"modified":"2009-07-11T22:56:52","modified_gmt":"2009-07-12T02:56:52","slug":"ipod-touch-3-0-upgrade","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/2009\/ipod-touch-3-0-upgrade\/","title":{"rendered":"iPod Touch 3.0 Upgrade"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"IMG_1909\"<\/a>Apple<\/a> provides the 3.0 upgrade “free” for iPhone owners, but those folk have either paid a premium for their devices or are locked into multi-year service agreements.\u00a0 If you have an iTouch, the upgrade is basically $10.\u00a0 While I would prefer that it was a free upgrade, I feel\u00a0 obligated as a software professional to pay for the software I use (I like it when people who use my software pay for it).<\/p>\n

The 3.0 upgrade adds a bunch of features<\/a>.\u00a0 In the brief time I’ve had the update, I haven’t used many of the new features but cut & paste is a welcome addition.\u00a0 Push notifications look like they will possibly fix the ‘no background apps’ issue, I’m looking forward to trying out some apps that make use of the feature.\u00a0 I didn’t notice that the web browser was slow, but I’m all about faster browsing.<\/p>\n

I wish they had gone further with the bluetooth<\/a> enhancement – ideally if they had managed to allow me to use my existing bluetooth enabled phone via an iTouch based interface I would have had a budget iPhone.\u00a0 Imagine being able to dial your current non-Apple phone via the touch and then have it route the headset audio through the touch.\u00a0 I suspect you’d soon get sick of carrying two devices and would drop the money on a real iPhone.\u00a0 Oh well, today all that is offered is stereo headset support.<\/p>\n

Read on for details on my upgrade difficulties, and how I resolved them.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

My upgrade wasn’t very smooth.\u00a0 I run iTunes<\/a> under Windows<\/a> which I host in a VMWare<\/a> image on my Ubuntu<\/a> desktop (say that fast 5 times).\u00a0 Usually this works fine, but not for the OS update – the start was fine, it managed to wipe my data and the existing OS – but then it failed with a somewhat cryptic message.\u00a0 Addtional attempts had the same problem.<\/p>\n

I ended up cross-booting my machine into a native WindowsXP install, creating a “virgin” iTunes installation and updating the OS that way.\u00a0 First I restored the 2.2.1 version, then I moved up to 3.0.\u00a0 This process went smoothly.<\/p>\n

Of course, since I was on a virgin install of iTunes, I didn’t have the previously purchased 3.0 update.\u00a0 I suspect that the Apple store would have been smart enough to remember that I had already bought it and not charge me again.\u00a0 However, I took the more hacker like approach and copied the update file (iPod2,1_3.0_7A341_Restore.ipsw) from my VMWare install and placed it in the right spot for my virgin iTunes to find it (\/Documents and Settings\/<User Name>\/Application Data\/Apple Computer\/iTunes\/iPod Software Updates).\u00a0 Then it was a simple matter of clicking the upgrade button –\u00a0 iTunes found the file, and was happy to install it (no prompting to purchase it, in fact the virgin iTunes doesn’t have an Apple ID associated with it at all).\u00a0 One neat trick is to click the Restore button while holding SHIFT, you’ll be prompted for the source firmware file to use.<\/p>\n

I don’t have hard evidence about what went wrong with the VMWare based install, but I’d caution others not to try.\u00a0 The 1st step of the install changes the type of USB device that is detected (it changes from a ‘camera’ into an ‘apple usb boot device’).\u00a0 I suspect that the firmware bootloader knows enough to download the firmware installer (into RAM) and then execute it.\u00a0 Once the firmware installer starts, it uses yet another USB protocol (I’m guessing here) and my Linux install had no idea what to do with this – and was not able to tunnel it through to the VMWare image in a sensible manner.\u00a0 So this failure to communicate, caused the upgrade to bail.<\/p>\n

The last thing that I screwed up was backups.\u00a0 When you synchronize your iTouch, iTunes will store a backup<\/a>.\u00a0 One is even created automatically when you do the OS upgrade.\u00a0 However, only the latest backup is kept – this is what got me into trouble.\u00a0 Since I had to perform the upgrade on the virgin iTunes install.\u00a0 When I moved to my VMWare hosted iTunes I got the prompt\u00a0 “Hey, this device is sync’d to another iTunes library, do you want to wipe and sync to this one?”.\u00a0 I foolishly answered yes, which in turn wiped out the useful backup.\u00a0 If I had been more careful I could have forced the restore of my backup over the new device (or at least found some way to save the data).\u00a0 The net result was the loss of the eBooks I had been reading, the network\/email\/etc. settings I had put in.\u00a0 Not a big loss, but frustrating.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Apple provides the 3.0 upgrade “free” for iPhone owners, but those folk have either paid a premium for their devices or are locked into multi-year service agreements.\u00a0 If you have an iTouch, the upgrade is basically $10.\u00a0 While I would prefer that it was a free upgrade, I feel\u00a0 obligated as a software professional to … Continue reading “iPod Touch 3.0 Upgrade”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-385","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gadgets"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/385","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=385"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/385\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":391,"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/385\/revisions\/391"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=385"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=385"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=385"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}