For my birthday last year my wonderful family gave me an iPod Touch.  Some feel its the red-headed step child of the iPhone family, but I think its wonderful. Its like having an iPhone without the phone bill. The first thing that I did, after marveling at the touch screen and its amazing interface is, was to jailbreak it. I wont go into details (use the google) but its essentially modifying the firmware on the device so that you can run 3rd party applications natively. Why would you want to do that? you might ask. Tons of reasons. Some of the great ones are:

SwapLibrary -Sync your device with multiple libraries (only two actually, but who needs more that that?)

NemusSync - Sync your calendar with your google calendar!

Games! - GemLogic, ParkingLot, Lexitron - enough goodies to fill a 45 minute commute

ruBooks - Use your touch like an ebook reader

I haven’t look into the legality of this but I’m sure its not 100% legit. This is why I’m a big fan of open source. I think the iPod Touch is great, but I’d really like a better ToDo list application. I could either(pre sdk) cross my fingers an hope that apple does something about it or take the law into my hands and jailbreak+write something myself.  If the iDevice operating system was open (like linux or BSD or etc…) I could joined the community of active developers, learned a lot of things about a really interesting project and give something back. Ah well, its a dream world where companies write open source software and still make money (or so I’m told).

Anyway, put that economic stimulus package to good use and go buy yourself an iPhone or iPod Touch.