One of the most frustrating things in the world is having a new toy and being unable to play with it; that’s the situation a growing number of users are finding themselves in, with their spanking new iPod Touch units refusing to play ball with their Macs and PCs. In fact, there seem to be a couple of distinct groups of people having problems.
Impress is reporting that Japanese buyers are unable to unlock their PMPs using Japanese language versions of Windows, and instead have been forming queues outside Apple stores to use the demo Macs to rescue their Touch from a perpetual “Connect to PC” prompt. Engadget Japan tells us that Apple has an update coming sometime next week which should fix it, but up until then you may as well put it back in the box.
Meanwhile, over at the Apple discussion boards some similarly disgruntled Touch owners from all over the world are having similar problems activating; unlike the Japanese issue, which looks to be down to poor language support on Apple’s part, these users would appear to have very little in common. No promise of a fix as of yet, but there have been a number of suggested workarounds including activating on a different computer and then syncing on your own, to manually restarting the Apple and iPod management services in Windows. Mileage, unsurprisingly, varies.
Have you had trouble activating your iPod Touch? Let us know in the comments, and don’t forget to mention whereabouts you are and if you’re using a non-English OS.
Written by: Chris Davies
6 Responses
I just received the german iPod touch and I’m also unable to unlock it with my german Windows (tried Vista and XP Professional). Very frustrating :-((
Do you have to be connected to the internet to activate it? I hope not - I sync my iPod from my user area, but only the administrator’s has internet access!
I had this issue, and error (6) whatever that means when trying to restore. I didn’t mind the restore, as I had only just bought the Touch an hour earlier but it was scary when it kept saying “couldn’t restore”. I fixed it by synching with a generic (ipod) logon on another machine then coming back to my main one and resychning with my logon (laurel’s ipod). Hope this helps someone. Oh and make sure you upgrade iTunes BEFORE connecting the ipod the first time.
Sorry, forgot to say, I’m in Australia.
Hi, I had an issue with my Touch. The problem I had was that when I plugged it in the first time it was charging but no connection to my iMac. i tried everything changing USB-ports rebooting nothing helped. Then I tried a longshot I went in to the library and through the iTunes-pkg from the reciept folder and then I downloaded and installed iTunes all over again. After that it worked I don’t if that did the trick or if I just got lucky but after that it has been rolling on without a glitch.
// H
the fcuker does not work