So what was wrong with your iPod Touch? Well basically a great big grey blob on the screen:
How did that happen? I don’t know. I looked after it quite well I thought.
What did the Apple guys say? Well first it was a 1st generation so it being out of warranty, I didn’t expect much. Anyway I took it along to my local Apple Store on Zurich's Bahnhofstrasse and was told it couldn’t be repaired as the screen wasn’t removable. Not sure why as I later replaced it myself (albeit it's now a brick). They did however offer me 10% off a new one but at the time I thought nah, not paying 300 and odd francs for what is in effect going to be the cost of repair. To their defence, I later tought that's quite good of them. One thing I remember was how the guys Apple were quite bewildered about how big and perfectly round the blob was. Apparently they’d never seen anything like that before!
So what did you do next? Got back home and found DirectFix.com - a site offering replacement iPod components. They shipped me a replacement LCD screen for around $30 including postage. Great I thought. Should be easy enough. Apart from getting the cover off it was. There’s plenty of videos on YouTube. Photo below shows old and new side by side. Notice the funny coloured blob on the top (original) screen:
My conclusion: Don’t try it at home kids. One thing I liked about the 1st generation was its ability to charge over Firewire (using my Blaupunkt iPod adaptor in the car for example). It also looks like I won’t be watching any iTunes rented movies for a while on my television set. I used the Touch with an older, what’s labelled 'iPod' Universal Dock/model A1153 which has an S-Video connector. It worked well as I have an older CRT television and the Apple TV is no use with its HDMI and component outputs. Oh well. I enjoyed it.
Above: My iPod with the grey spot before I attempted a screen exchange.