The other day I decided to try “jailbreaking” my iPod Touch. As far as I can tell there is nothing illegal about doing this; it just invalidates the warranty from Apple. I didn’t have an original warranty to begin with since I bought it refurbished from eBay, so no worries there.

I’ve included a screenshot of one of the screens to give you an idea of how different you can make an iPod Touch look using a custom theme and installing third party apps. I think this is pretty cool! I know that the iPhone SDK is coming soon and I also realize there is some risk involved in doing this but I’m comfortable with what I’ve done in terms of being able to recover to the original state if need be. There are some incredible (free) third party apps already available including a full-featured pinball machine game complete with sound effects that is really nice. And there is a Labyrinth game that makes nice use of the iPod Touch’s accelerometer. Interestingly, one of the most innovative and full-featured apps is basically an electronic version of an Etch-A-Sketch complete with the ability to shake the iPod Touch to erase what is drawn and start over.