I have committed more than a few pixels to extolling the many, many virtues of Soma FM on These Very Pages over the past handful of years. This week (and next, barring some sort of unforeseen but sadly-not-unprecidented disaster) they are offering something new and wickedly original. Mission Control is a new (and necessarily short-lived) channel that mixes the brain tentacles of electronic ambient music with the live feed of mission audio to and from STS-132, the last hurrah of the United States space shuttle program. It runs until shuttle touchdown, scheduled for May 26, 2010.

It’s funky and cool and hey – you just might learn something. They offer the usual spread of iTunes playlist feeds in AAC and MP3, a firewall-friendly MP3 feed, and the Soma pop-up player – which would be a cool idea if it wasn’t Flash, but it is Flash so it pretty much sucks. And, as always, it’s presented sans commercials and 100% free-as-in-beer free.

I have pimped Adobe’s “Kuler” technology a couple of times in the past. Now you can tie into this incredibly useful tool in a super portable way with Saturation. Down at ye olde home improvement big box looking at paint? Trying to decide on fabric for curtains while at the mill store? Now you can hit the guts of the Kuler package with a seriously slick (and an addictively fun) iPhone interface.

Cost: Free.

Recommendation: Highest.

A couple of quick notes for the folks who wondered:

The unlocked and untethered iPhone 3.1.2 is indeed still up and active, ready for your general enjoyment (with instructions!) on the iPhone unlock page.

The instructions for getting onto your corporate Cisco VPN if your IT department hides and encrypts the group password in a PCF file are still up and still valid. You can check them out here.

It’s cool. I got ya covered.

For those of you patiently waiting … wait no more. I have posted 3.1 firmware files – unlocked and jailbroken – for both the original (first-generation) iPhone and the iPhone 3G. There are “vanilla” versions and “full-on geek” versions of each one, pick your poison appropriately. All files, as well as easy instructions, are on the unlock page and ready for your downloading pleasure.

Enjoy.

I am going to go way out on a limb here and guess that you already know this, but – if you have a jailbroken and/or unlocked iPhone, do not update to version 3.1 of the firmware. 3.1 updates the baseband yet again, and you will be left with a locked device.

However – you can downgrade back to 3.0 or 3.0.1 and re-activate with Redsn0w. so you don’t end up with a brick or anything tragic like that. It’s just an annoyance and a couple of hours of your time. But best to avoid the whole thing for now.

One thing about the “Genius Mix” feature in the new iTunes is that you have to go to the “Store” menu of iTunes and use the “Update Genius” selection. Only after you do that will the “Genius Mixes” item show up in your toolbar. You’re welcome.

So here we are – a mere 36 hours from Yet Another Apple Event. And all sorts of fenderheads are out there working themselves into a lather because they have convinced themselves that the long-rumoured Apple “tablet” will be handed down to the masses tomorrow.

Er, no.

These people need to get a grip. This is an iPod event. Period. When Apple has a music theme for an event (and I will go way out on a limb here and guess that “It’s Only Rock And Roll” is really a musical cue) that event is about iPods, iTunes, and … well, that’s it. Done. Finis.

Yes, there will be a tablet eventually. The thing is in the works, and you will see it sometime in 2010. And it will fill a need in a way that will startle you, and it will be insanely good (of course) and there will be rejoicing by all.

Just not now.

So – what will we see tomorrow? Here is a quick rundown, from the for-sure to the if-pigs-fly possibilities:

A new iPod Touch with a camera, compass, and virtually everything else in an iPhone except for that phone part: Definitely. The new SDK for the iPhone OS has explicit support for these hardware goodies in the iPod Touch code library. A couple of people involved in writing that code library have told me just what a crapload of work was involved. People don’t do that just for fun. Combine that with the age of the current iPod Touch and this one is a no-brainer. Probability: 100%

The last ever traditional iPods: Yep. This is the swan song for the device that changed entertainment and the music industry and interface design and what we expect from handheld devices forever. Look for the last ever “old-school” iPods with bigger-than-ever memory and lower-than-ever prices. No, they won’t tell you that these are the last ones, but they are. Probability: 100%

Full HD video on video-capable iPods: Probably. The timing of this event, just a couple of days before Microsoft launches their “last gasp” Zune with HD video is not a coincidence. Look for the repositioning of the Touch (and possibly the nano) from hand-held entertainment devices to portable whole-home entertainment devices / portable computing solutions. Probability: 80%

A startling new iPod nano with the iPhone OS as its interface: This might be less far-fetched than you would think. It’s not exactly a secret that the iPhone OS will be the interface of the future for all of the iPhones, and possibly all of Apple’s “handheld” devices (see the “wild guess” below). And there is reference to the nano in the current iPhone SDK. But how to integrate that sort of OS with the smaller form factor and screen? Honestly, I have no idea. One incredibly far-fetched idea is that the entire surface of the nano might be a touch screen – front, back, sides, all of it. There have been mentions of nanos with “freaky shells” floating around the Apple campus for the past month of so – could that be what they are? Probability: 50%

The splitting of the Shuffle from the iPod brand: This could be a real surprise for a lot of people. Shuffles sell in staggering numbers, but the fact of the matter is that Apple is committed to the iPhone OS as their handheld/portable interface. And for obvious reasons, the Shuffle just cant get onto that particular bandwagon. They aren’t going to axe the Shuffle, but they might change it drastically and send it out to do battle as its own product and its own brand. Probability: 45%

An all-new iTunes: Maybe, maybe not. The fact that iTunes is the only core piece left on the OS X platform that is not a full 64-bit application irks a lot of people at Apple. 32-bits is so ghetto now. But – there are more installs of iTunes on Windows machines than there are on OS X machines. And there are no viable tools for 64-bit application development in the Windows world as of yet. Rewriting iTunes for Cocoa would be a snap for Apple, but then they get into the nightmare of divergent versions on the two computing platforms. Damned if you do and damned if you don’t. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the answer is “don’t” and we end up waiting for this until next year and the launch of the tablet. Probability: 35%

The super-awesome new media format that makes music and art and interactive media a single integrated and essential unit and by extension makes you want to buy albums instead of just the singles you want: Hmmmm. This is a poser. I am sure you have heard about this, possibly under the nom du guerre “Cocktail” and you can probably understand why the record companies want this so badly. For years they were able to sell entire albums on the strength of one or two songs and you had to buy all the dreck as well. Now people can pick and choose what they want, and quality counts. This is an ongoing idea to get more quality and value into the “package” so that you might buy the album even if you dont care for more than half the songs. Is this ready for prime time? Probably not. But someday … maybe. Probability: 20%

Steve Jobs making an appearance on stage: Nope. Forget it. He is back to work and healthy, but the torch has been passed. He won’t be on stage today unless it is just to introduce Phil or thank everyone at the end. Probability: 5%

Finally, under the heading of a “wild guess that you can file away for next year, look for two rather startling things: One, the tablet (when it comes) will be a huge break from Apple’s traditional “laptop” structure and actually use the iPhone OS instead of OS X. Two, the combination of the iPhone OS and the new “socially-based” iTunes will be the first solid steps into “cloud” computing for the average joe. Your library will follow you everywhere no matter what device you happen to be using, regardless of actual storage, and you can interact with your friends and cohorts on a “social media” front wherever you happen to be. Remember – you read that here first.

I am a complete sucker for innovation – especially in gaming. If it is new and cool and different and fun, I will be the first in line to pluck my simoleans down for a title. Everything from Animal Crossing to Guitar Hero to Boom Blox – I’ll search it out and be more than happy to pay. So when something that reaches up into that part of the stratosphere and it is free … well, you can connect those dots for yourself.

And when you do connect those dots, you end up with Word Ace – a combination of a word game and poker that is 100% winner-winner-chicken-dinner. The guys at Self Aware Games took scrabble, mixed it half-and-half with hold ‘em poker, added a dash of really slick on-line play, in-game chat, and an achievement system, and they brought it in at the low low price of free. So yeah, that works for me. Big time. The game is available for the Palm Pre and the iPhone and if you have either of those devices you need to take a look.

You can find all the details here (note: that is an iTunes store link) and see what else the gang at Self Aware is up to over here.

As you may or may not know (mostly because satellite radio is still completely irrelevant to most people, for reasons we have discussed previously) the two big players in the game – Sirius and XM – recently completed their long-discussed merger. And, to not a lot of people’s great surprise, it hasn’t helped much. Sure, it stopped the fracturing of the market and the division of the consumer dollars, but that doesn’t help much when the market is pretty much dead in the first place.

However – and remember where you read this – next week SiriusXM and Apple will announce the migration of satellite radio to the very device that killed the market before it ever started: The iPod. On Wednesday we should see a small, simple, and cheap attachment for the iPod that will take satellite radio portable. The underpinnings on the iPod side of things were added in the latest version of the SDK so the interface should be pretty slick. Better, other developers are free to use the radio integration as well – se we may see some cool third-party uses of the satellite feed that drive even a few more sales.

Will this make enough of a difference to save satellite radio? Maybe – there are almost 80 million iPhone and iPod Touch units out on the street already. If the interface is good and there are attractive subscription incentives and even a fraction of those people subscribe, the industry could see it’s market share doubled or even tripled overnight.

Also, there is an outside but not-completely-unrealistic chance that when Apple splashes down the new iPod Touch hardware in September (just three days before the new Microsoft Zune) that there will be some sort of irresistible incentive to get iPod and iPhone owners to give satrad a try. Keep your eyes peeled and – if you are a fan of this particular struggling business – your fingers crossed.

Apple moved pretty quickly to patch the “text message” vulnerability that was revealed at the Black Hat conference this week. Look for Google and the Symbian people to get their own updates out within the next couple of days, but don’t hold your breath for a fix for the HTC phones that run Windows Mobile anytime soon. Next year, maybe. Kudos the the Black Hat geeks (who are generally cool and awesome) to dig this one up, and kudos to the gang in Cupertino for taking care of it in a hurry.

However, that is not the point of this post.

The point is that the 3.0.1 update makes a small but not trivial change to the baseband section of the iPhone OS, and if you have an unlocked or jailbroken phone, taking this update will hose it. No bricks or anything, but you will have to put your phone in DFU mode and do a full restore from your local firmware image, and the whole thing is a pain in the ass.

I will work up an OS file as soon as I can to account for the fix, but in the mean time: Do not update your iPhone if it is unlocked, and do NOT accept weird SMS traffic from sources you don’t know (which is not something I should probably have to tell you in the first place).

I’ve posted up a nicely unlocked and jailbroken version of the 3.0 iPhone firmware for all of the “2G” folks in the crowd. If you have an original iPhone, have it unlocked, and want to upgrade to all of the super awesome features of the 3.0 version … this is your lucky day. Two versions of the firmware – one with Icy and Cydia, one without – and complete instructions are posted right here.

As the cool kids say, “Woot”.

A REMINDER: If you have a first or second generation iPhone that is either unlocked or jailbroken and you want to keep it that way, do not upgrade to version 3.0 just yet. A bit of patience is in order, but you also need not fret, you will probably be able to upgrade this weekend. I have done my phone with the standard tools from the dev team, and it works just fine. But my pal John did the same thing and his was a big ol’ botch. As soon as the kinks are worked out, I will post a handy one-shot firmware target for your downloading and installing pleasure.

Stay tuned.

There is a really cool little application called “Bushes” on the iPhone application store right now – it is a super-simple yet deceptively competent painting and illustration program. You use your finger as a brush, there are a mere 5 controls, and within that set of limitations you can (if you are talented in this sort of thing, which I am definitely not) produce some startlingly good art.

How startlingly good was shown when the cover of last week’s New Yorker magazine was painted with this app, on the little iPhone screen, by an artist just standing on the street corner. What is even more interesting (from a “new media” point of view”) is that there is a free “companion” application you can download that will “replay” the creation of the painting. Now you can share now only your finished work, but the process as well.

A couple of things of note here: One, like a lot of other developers, the guys who created it have knocked down the price in response to getting Suddenly Famous. You can get it now for four bucks or so, which is whim money. Two, the thought and care that was put into this application – and specifically the way the tools work – is verging on remarkable. I have used Photoshop for well over a decade, and consider myself more than a bit skilled there, but I still cant sit down and “paint”. But with this – well, I wont show you my rather amateur creation, but suffice to say it was easy, fun, intuitive, and better than anything I could ever do with a full desktop package.

If I had talent, this thing would be dangerous. Highest recommendation.

You have probably read nine grillion things about the new iPhone already, so after a quick run with it today I just want to say two things:

1 – The cut, copy and paste routines are insanely intuitive and natural.

2 – The visuals of the compass application are absolutely and totally beautiful.

I mean, I couldn’t stop staring at the damn thing. Just incredible work by that team. Wow.

Sadly (and annoyingly) I will not be at WWDC this year. No swag, no networking, no learning, no amazing cream puffs from Beard Papa. I must be undergoing punishment for something.

I find myself wondering what the hell it is that I did … and I hope that I at least enjoyed it.

However, even if you don’t go in person, you still get all of the development tools that the attendees get. So I was picking through my new “cocoa mobile” kit last night and there are a whole series of new routines in there for video processing, saving, and manipulation. This is interesting from a couple of points of view – the most intriguing of which is that it points to a brand new iPhone being ready to go. Why? Easy – the processor in the current generation of iPhones is good as far as these things go, but it really has no way to deal with video processing, it just doesn’t have the horses. If you are going to shoot and edit video on the iPhone, there needs to be a significant upgrade at both the processor and in the amount of RAM on board.

Better – from the average Joe point of view, anyway – is the fact that a new processor would also need a new and better battery. The current battery life is barely adequate (mostly thanks to the uselessness and low-tech nature of the ghetto 3G network) and any sort of an upgrade will be more than welcome.

Fingers crossed, for sure.

So. I am making only two predictions for the keynote this year. One, a new iPhone with a seriously upgraded processor, a better battery, and video capabilities. Two, there will be no stupid tablet computer.

Enjoy your weekend – and check back for the scoop one way or the other on Monday.

UPDATE: For those who asked, the chances of S. Jobs showing up at WWDC are exactly zero. He is by all accounts doing well, and has started emailing people at the Cupertino campus now and again, but is a long way from any public appearances. So look for Phil on stage tomorrow.

After being featured – which, I am told, is a huge feather in the cap for any developer – the guys who did the fabulous Classics application have lowered the price to 99 cents as a little bit of a celebration and thank you. If you haven’t seen this application yet you are really missing out. It currently features 20 works of western literature that range from the beloved (The Hound Of The Baskervilles) to the semi-obscure (Flatland) but all of which have two things in common: One, they are now in the public domain, and two, they are universally excellent.

For me this set was a no-brainer – so many of the heroes of my youth are here, in books that were my best friends and welcome escapes in my pre-teen years. Arronax and Nemo, Square and Sphere, Jim Hawkins and Long John Silver, the Eloi and the Morlocks, Watson and Holmes, and the indomitable Ned Land … the whole gang is assembled, in your pocket and ready for a few moments – or a few hours – of entertainment whenever you have the urge.

There are two really remarkable things about this exercise that make it work anyone’s while, not just a fanboy like me. The interface is brilliant – simple, easy, and incredibly workable, this is the interface that the Kindle people should have used. It’s elegant and pretty much perfect and belies the fact that the creators are just some spare-time joes. And the content is ever-expanding … once you purchase Classics, you get additional titles as free updates as they are added to the roster.

Buy it. Now.

Yes, Christmas music. Not “seasonal” music, not “holiday” music, it’s fucking Christmas music.

Anyway – it’s that time of year, and the fine folks at Soma FM are once again streaming the two best channels of Christmas music on the whole damn planet. For your chilled out and laid back times, there is “Christmas Lounge” (fireplace defintiely recommended) and for the rest of your day there is the insanely awesome “Xmas in Frisko” which I could not praise highly enough even if I sat here and typed non-stop until my fingers were bloody stumps and I passed out from lack of egg nog.

The desktop channels are old hat, and will probably talk to your box no matter what OS or software you have. And new this year is streaming in an alternative format specifically for mobile iTunes-based devices – if you have an iPod Touch or an iPhone, you seriously need to check this bit out. It’s way cool.

If you have an iPhone you may have noticed that making your own ringtones from audio files you already own is a complete and total pain. While ringtones you purchase and download from the iTunes store are super easy, your own tunes and sounds are a complete and utter exercise in frustration. There are two reasons for this:

One: There is a different set of copyrights involved between a song you download for listening to versus a song you are downloading as a ringtone, and this leads to a digital divide between the two, and

Two: Ringtone sales a a massive cash cow for both Apple and the record labels that own the rights to the songs, and they are not going to give that up by making it easy for you to brew your own.

This is not just an iPhone/ Apple phenomenon, either. Most cellular carriers and handset manufacturers are are also in on this … if they do not outright deny you any way to get homebrew ringtones on a device, they manage to put up enough roadblocks that most people give up and hand over their coin for the “official” method.

Well, enough.

Welcome to “I Want Free Ringtones“, a website that acts as a filter, processor, and host for converting your own audio files into delicious and free (as in free beer) ringtones. It is dead simple, too: You upload your file, use the site’s tools to crop it for time (if you didn’t or couldn’t do that at your end beforehand) and adjust the volume, preview the thing with the on-line audio player, and then either save the result back to your hard drive or leave it hosted on the site so you can surf to it later. It’s fast, super easy, and works exactly as advertised. You can save the files as QCP (lo-fi tones, for the Motorola crowd), M4A or MP3 (hi-fi tones for the rest of the world), or M4R (the special Apple hi-fi format that the iPhone is looking for).

The hosting function, by the way, is perfect for Blackberry users – one of the slickest parts of the BB package is that you can use the web browser to surf to an MP3 file you create with this tool and use a single click to convert the target file into a ringtone that you install over the air. Better, you can share your creations with your friends just by passing around the URL.

The whole thing is a total hoot no matter what phone you carry. But – for Blackberry users who want to stretch their legs and for iPhone users tired of trying to navigate the gordian knot of M4R files – this is the greatest thing since sliced pizza.

Enjoy.

In the emails that darted around following my link to “Google Earth For iPhone” it became clear that some – nay, a lot of – people are using the mainline web browser on their iPhone to access Google for searching. They spark up Safari, hit google.com, and type in a search just like they would at their desktop or laptop workstations.

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

What you want to do is go to the app store and get “Google Mobile” as realized for the iPhone. It is smaller, faster, and better because it knows enough to search your local data along with whatever it can get from the web. It is a combination of a super-thin, super-fast web search engine and a metafinder for your own on-board info. It rocks large, and if you aren’t using it you need to start. Right now.

They just posted official notice on the Google blogs – Google Earth is up and running on the iPhone. And, more to the point, it is absolutely glorious. Read about it here, and then get it on iTunes, stat.

Yes, it’s free.

And duh, it’s beta.

The news wires are all a-twitter this morning about RIM’s impending launch of an “Application Store” for Blackberries. This is a good thing. One of the big gaps between the iPhone and the Blackberry is a thriving developer community. There are hundreds of third-party applications for the iPhone … for the Blackberry, not so much. Worse, anyone can buy iPhone apps on a whim, and have them in hand and installed with about 20 seconds of wait time and a single mouse click, whereas dealing with aftermarket programs for your ‘berry can be a world-class pain.

I hope, however, that RIM has their wits about them and copies the idea of the iPhone App Store, but stays as far away as possible from the execution. On the surface, the iPhone store is brilliant – it gives developers an almost cost-free distribution channel, it gives them more margin than a traditional store and production process, it gives users a one-stop shopping experience, it gives instant gratification, and it encourages prices that are so low that for the first time ever there is “impulse buying” in a software market.

But – and this is a huge but – all of that is corrupted and overridden by the fact that the mechanism is broken, and Apple has taken a stupid and selfish approach about which applications are okay and which are verboten, and doesn’t seem to be willing to give anyone any valid or concrete information on how they decide what is what. They are reserving the right to randomly pull and/or disallow applications based on some nebulous-yet-incosistent policies regarding competition and/or usability. But mostly, of course, competition. This is the same sort of bullshit that Microsoft pulled regarding web browsers and it is nothing more than greed and very dirty pool. In fact, this is worse since Microsoft at least had the consistency to try and squash all competition, whereas Apple is being randomly draconian, with no rhyme or reason beyond being general assholes.

Apple needs to fix this problem, and RIM needs to make sure it never happens to them. On today’s investor conference call it was revealed that Apple outsold RIM in handsets in the last quarter – not a secret, but this was the first official confirmation. If RIM plays their cards right and shows Apple how software should really be sold, they could reverse that trend before spring.

Waterloo, the next move is yours.

Two quick notes about Air Sharing:

1: The number of formats that you can view has been expanded in the newest version, available now at the iTunes App Store.

2: Air Sharing is no longer free, and now costs seven bucks.

Item one means you need to update if you are already an Air Sharing user, and if you aren’t a user then you need to get on the bandwagon, stat. Item two, on the other paw, means nothing. If you already have this package then the update is free, and if you don’t have this you really need it and it will be seven dollars well spent. Period.

There is an update available now for Wurdle, and it has a feature that is either really cool or really annoying, depending on how competitive and/or irritable you are. When you are done a game, you now have the option to see all the words you missed and should have found if you weren’t such a fenderhead. The feature is fun, but also rather humiliating. If you have Wurdle already, you need to grab this update – there are other goodies in it, including a more responsive “shake” – and if you don’t have Wurdle then you really need to spend the three dollars and get it now.

Wurdle rocks.

Air Sharing is a wickedly cool and totally slick application for the iPhone that lets you wirelessly mount your phone as a drive to any workstation you might have and drag and drop files between the two. Better, it includes built-in viewers for a plethora of file types, so once you drag your spreadsheets or PDFs or RTF or Word documents or whatever over to the phone, you can display them seamlessly and instantly.

The whole thing is so well thought out that it is almost witchcraft – everything is totally seamless and self-contained and even the most feeble user can make it work right away. Better, the list of file formats is growing, and the next update should double the number of things you can view and use. And best of all, it is free right now, for the first couple of weeks of release. It will probably be close to 10 bucks after the free period, and quite frankly even that is a deal.

If you have an iPhone, you need Air Sharing. Period. Free or not, it is the best piece of productivity software to come down the pipe since the iPhone hit the market. Five stars, and then some.

As promised, here is a complete 2.1 firmware file which will upgrade your unlocked iPhone to version 2.1 and contains the Installer and Cydia packages. Remember that you must put your phone in to DFU mode to restore from this file – complete instructions are on the iPhone unlocking page. Enjoy!

The verdict is in, via my rash experimentation with my own phone: If you have an unlocked or jailbroken iPhone and you upgrade to version 2.1, you are good to go. Your phone will remain free and happy – the only caveat is that you will lose your “Installer” and “Cydia” applications.

However, this is such a good update, that you should take it regardless.

If you really must have Installer et al, then wait until tomorrow – iIam going to build a 2.1 firmware file tonight with Installer and Cydia built in, so you can install that if you wait a handful of hours. You’re welcome.

One of the coolest things about the Application Store for the iPhone is that the distribution mechanism (ie; insanely easy, with no overhead at all for the developers or publishers) and the profit margin (way more money into the developers’ pockets than any traditional model) means that we are now seeing the advent of “impulse” software purchases. Since the developers can sell their product for 2 or 3 bucks and still make some serious coin, software is for the first time ever priced at a point where you can just buy something on a whim, and if you dont like it or you only use it once … big deal. It costs about as much as a cup of coffee.

Which is a very roundabout way of getting to the actual point: I bought Wurdle on a complete whim because it was a puzzle game (which I like), a word game (which I love), and only cost $2.99 (which meant that I said “what the hell” and gave it a click). The result? Wurdle is an insanely great game, totally addictive, perfect for any sort of “got a few minutes and need a break” play, and is way more interesting and well-thought-out than most of the game software you buy for 49.99 down at Ye Olde Best Buye.

If you have an iPhone or an iPod touch, get Wurdle. Period. Or else.

Grr.

I will download the new iTunes as soon as I get a better connection to the interwebs and take a peek-see on your behalf. It looks like the main show – the new “genius” feature – is just LastFM taken to its extremes of integration. And, not coincidentally, revenue potential. However, adding Magnetosphere to the built-in visualizers is very cool. Everyone loves Magentosphere!

As far as the new iPhone firmware, due to drop on Friday: If you have an untethered iPhone, do not update until you hear from a reliable source that the update will not put your phone back into the clutches of the evil bastards who run the cell companies. For now, just sit tight.

As per usual, there is a fall “Apple Event” this week. And also as per usual, there is not much mystery about the fall event – this year, as in years past, they have issued the invitation in such a way that it is pretty obvious that this is an “iPod” event:

Yeah, not leaving much to the imagination there. So what will we see? There will be a revamp of the Nano for sure – probably a slightly bigger screen, better video, and more memory – and look for a big increase in the storage capacity of the Touch. In fact, there is a good chance that Tuesday’s event will signal the start of the very quiet death of the traditional iPod, with the whole full-sized lineup moving towards a touch-screen-based, application-running palmtop.

If there is any sort of surprise, it will be either something cool for AppleTV, or some sort of minor content bombshell for the iTunes store. Regardless, it is pretty certain that Apple will again make a gigantic shitload of money this Christmas season.

A number of you have wondered if you can use the same instructions that are on the “Unlock Your iPhone” page to jailbreak their iPod Touches.

Um, no.

Sadly, the firmware isn’t the same, so trying to restore that custom iPhone OS to your Touch will fail, and miserably. But, in the spirit of going “above and beyond” I have coded up a jailbroken firmware package for the iPod Touch, and you can use the same super-easy instructions to get your Touch wrangled and into line. Download this file by either control-clicking (Apple users) or right-clicking (Windows users) on this link:

iPod1,1_2.0.1_5B108_GeekboyDotCa_Restore.ipsw

and save the file in a convenient spot. Then just follow steps 2 through 6 on this page here, making sure you use the file you downloaded above for your restore. Your iPod will be fully up to 2.0 snuff, but still be packing Installer and Cydia,

Don’t say I never did anything for ya.