You originally paid 20 dollars last time.
Last time we weren't paying for the privilege of giving Apple MORE money through the App store, though. A friend of mine who is not computer literate commented to me they thought it was odd that I had to pay for the right to pay some more. I think maybe they have a point. Still, it was worth the $10 to get the "Remote" application, which is better than using Remote Buddy or Signal to do the same thing and I bought both of those in the past and it was more like $25-30 each or so, not $10. Even so, I can understand why people are upset given the "store" nature of the upgrade. Sometimes, it feels like Apple charges just to charge. Sorry, this talk about 'accounting' things is just plain BS. This creates a new source of revenue for them so it's not an accounting issue. It's a software update. I'm tired of people buying into Apple's bologna on things like this and then yelling at people who complain. If you enjoy paying Apple money, fine. Don't tell us we all should. $10 x many units = a lot of money. If $10 is no big deal, please have everyone on the planet send me $10. That's MY feelings on the issue. Yes, I paid it, but that doesn't mean I agree with it (especially given I already paid $20 for apps that are being included with this one for $10 so I've double paid for the same thing twice in effect; how come it was worth $20 then and is worth $10 now plus the 2.0 firmware if it's accounting? They could have charged 99 cents and accomplished the same thing so it's just a load of malarkey; they're looking to make MONEY on this, not satisfy some accounting thing where 10 cents would have done the trick) nor should I have to in a free society.
As for the whole upgrade process, the first scare I got was iTunes reported that it could not backup my iPod Touch and that if I continued, it'd have to wipe it clean first. This was more of a scare because I thought maybe it was the USB problem all over again (i.e. I've had errors using both unpowered and powered USB 2.0 hubs in the past and only recently tried a direct to card connection on my PowerMac, which worked that time, but I feared the problem was back again). This fear was made more palpable when iTunes then said "Preparing iPod for Restore" or something to that effect and appeared to just sit there in an infinite loop for many minutes (all restores in the past took a couple of seconds, not 8 minutes or whatever it was). I then used that time to look up those words and sure enough, people were saying that's where it got stuck for them on past restores.
I was just getting ready to pull the plug and try manually wiping the iPod Touch when the thing finished doing what it was doing (a progress indicator would have alleviated that concern that nothing was happening) and it rebooted the iPod Touch and 2.0 was already installed. Apparently, it was NOT "preparing" anything during that time. It was INSTALLING the 2.0 firmware. It also restored my settings (email sync and what not) from a previous backup.
I then proceeded to sync 1400 songs, 1200 photos, 2 apps (Remote and AIM) and it all went OK (I guess the direct USB connection works OK as it hasn't 'disappeared from iTunes" yet using it like the hub connections did). For a USB 2.0 device, though, transfers seem pretty darn slow, IMO (nothing new; they were slow before the upgrade too). I used Tiger to sync it, but I know Leopard has improved Apple's awful USB 2.0 drivers so maybe that would have helped, but given the comments by others on here who are probably using Leopard, I doubt it. I think the flash drive in it must simply be very slow at writing files or something. Still, given some of the comments in this thread about going to sleep and waking up to find it's ALMOST DONE resyncing I'd imagine mine is doing OK as it 'only' took an hour or so (I was watching a tv show at the time so I don't know exactly how long) to resync 14GB worth of stuff.
"Remote" is definitely better than Signal and Remote Buddy and until such time they make their own 'app' version that somehow beats Remote's features and styling, I won't be using them anymore to control my whole house audio system. I'll leave Remote Buddy running, though since I can do other things with it like view my WebCam and desktop from the iPod Touch remotely.
AIM appears to be limited by Apple's policy of not letting apps keep running in the background. It can leave you 'logged on', but you won't get the messages until you actually start the app back up. This is an example of where draconian policies hamper usefulness. I'd imagine there will be many messenger programs (like Pidgin, perhaps) that will be for jailbreaked units that will not have those limitations. I can only hope Apple wises up and allows more leeway in application development. I suspect if you want file browsing/transfers, emulators, etc. you will be forced to jailbreak your iPhone/Touch, though as Apple is only in it for themselves, not your best interests. Similarly, don't expect media card support any time soon on any iPhone/Touch model (might allow you to more easily bypass their 30% off the top store front).
