I recently purchased an iPod touch. This would be the fifth iPod (I've owned a 4th gen, two fifth gen and a Shuffle) and it is by far the best. The user interface is a thing of beauty and the hardware is sublime. If you think I'm sounding like an impartial fan-boy, remember, I've been using handhelds since the very early Palm days, I've owned at least one device in every generation on the Windows mobile side of things and have tested gazillions of different smartphones running other operating systems. The iPod touch (we don't yet have the iPhone officially in Australia) has only one deficiency - a lack of storage capacity - and there's a 32GB option that costs less than many PDAs from just a couple of years ago that boasted on 128MB of memory.

However, despite all this, there was one serious deficiency - applications. Apple's walled garden approach meant that you could run any software you liked as long as it came from Apple. Fortunately, there's a easy way around this. My 16GB iPod touch has been updated to the latest firmware, 1.1.4, and has the software update that adds Mail, Google Maps and some other stuff. And I've added one more thing...

I decided to jailbreak my iPod touch so that I could run third party applications. I know I could wait for Apple to open their promised App Store but that's a whole week away - who can wait that long? After chatting to a couple of friends who have jailbreaked their iPods I settled on Ziphone. Ziphone loads an application catalog that lets you choose and then download apps directly to the iPod touch (or iPhone).

My first attempts to load Ziphone resulted in panic - my iPod touch was bricked. However, there are easy instructions on Apple's web site to resolve this. You need to put the device into Recovery Mode. This reloads the default firmware to the iPod so you're back in factory condition. My iPod touch was quite full so I started by restoring the iPod so there was no data on it and then jailbreaking it.

The result is that I have a fully functional iPod touch with all of Apple's original functionality as well as the ability to install third party applications. I now have the ultimate handheld - till I get my 2nd Generation iPhone.