Big news for iPod Touch owners. The Touchmod blog has discovered that the dock connector has the full set of pins, which means that it accepts audio-in. Which in turn means VoIP won’t be far off, and therefore the iPod Touch will become the phoneless iPhone, with a phone.

The intrepid hacker, Marian, has successfully made a recording using Erica Sadun’s (of The Unofficial Apple Weblog) recording software. It’s a hardware hack right now: You’ll need to grab an old dock connector and do some soldering, but it shouldn’t be long before somebody gets the Griffin iTalk to work with it.

Line In Audio active on the iPod Touch [Touchmods via TUAW]

Forum post [iPod Touch Fans]

I bought a new iPod Touch yesterday (8GB, seeing as you ask) and I thought I’d better take one for the team: I Jailbroke it.

The process was simple. IJailbreak, the application we covered on Monday, has since been updated to run on PowerPC Macs and will automagically add iPhone applications if you ask it to. No command line: it just works.

First off, you surf to a specified URL in the Touch’s web browser, which promptly causes it to crash: iJailbreak uses a tiff exploit to open up the iPod’s file system.

That done, you plug the touch into the computer (iTunes off, please), and follow the instructions. After around five minutes, the initial step is done, and what follows is a series of reboots and clicking of “OK” buttons on the computer.

After the final restart, the home screen appears as in the picture above. In addition to the standard applications, you now have Mail, Google Maps, Weather, Stocks, Notes and an installer, which will update its list of applications from the web and add them to the Touch.

Everything works fine. ITunes has no problem synching, all the settings (WiFi, bookmarks etc.) are intact. I just have sweet new functionality the iPod.

As to the Touch itself, I love it. I live in Spain, and have never even seen an iPhone in the flesh, so the multi touch interface is new magic to me. Music sounds at least as good as the 2G Nano, and Apple seems to have sorted out the dreaded “negative blacks” problem with the early units: Video is sharp and bright.

One complaint, which has been echoed across the web – no external controls. You have to pull the whole thing out of your pocket, hit the home button and swipe the unlock switch just to skip a track or turn the thing down. I have a set of Sennheiser earbuds with an inline volume slider, but it’s still a pain.

In short, if you don’t need a new phone (or if you live outside the US), grab a Touch. With the iJailbreak hack, you get all the functionality (no camera or phone, obviously) and none of the bricking issues. And for me, the ability to sit out in the sun with morning coffee and browse the previous day’s Gadget Lab before starting work is alone worth the price (which was €290, or $410, by the way. Us Europeans get stung).

Product page [iJailbreak]

If the words “Unofficial Firmware Upgrade” chill you, skip this post. If you are an intrepid hacker, willing to turn your Canon digicam into a brick, read on. This fairly simple modification, from the CHDK Wiki, will unlock several features of Canon’s DIGIC II processor, usually only enabled on the SLRs and other high end cameras. So what do you get? From the FAQ:

RAW shooting

Live histogram

Zebra mode (blinking highlights and shadows)

Depth of Field calculator

Battery indicator

Scripts execution (exposure/focus/… bracketing, intervalometer and more)

File browser

Text reader

Calendar

Games

As firmware hacks go, this one is fairly safe, as it loads the new configuration from the SD card on boot. Simply copy the files to your memory card. If you remove the firmware from the card, the camera will go back to its vanilla self.

Current models supported are the A610, A620, A630, A640, A700, A710 IS, S2 IS and the S3 IS. In theory, any DIGIC II model will work, but you’ll have to do some modification to the files, which ain’t easy.

The best part of all is that, for the A-series at least, the “Direct Print” button finally gets a useful function: This is the default key to access the new features. If you try it, good luck!

Wiki FAQ [CHDK Wiki via Crunchgear]

Hacking the iPhone is going slowly, but the sheer number of people working on it means that progres is being made. The latest news from the iPhone Dev Wiki is iASign, a Mac application which will generate an unlock code for the iPhone, based on the Device ID, IMEI (the universal serial number) and ICCID (Integrated Circuit Card ID) numbers.

This doesn't mean that you can use the iPhone with another carrier, but it does mean that you don't need the special iPhone SIM to get the phone working. And if the reports are true, you can pop in any Cingular or AT&T SIM and make calls, useful if you are an existing customer and don't want to pick up the iPhone call plan.

It’s not an easy hack. You’ll need some knowledge of the command line and also how to replace files on the iPhone, but if you are up to the task, the iPhone Dev people say it works great.

As before, the wiki folks have asked us not to link to the site in case it collapses again. If you can help, though, check out the IRC channel.

IRC [iPhone Dev]