Recently, developer James Whelton has managed to hack his 6th generation iPod Nano which he won recently at “some award.” His hack enabled him to bypass cache compression of the device, which resulted in the installation of a Springboard hack on the iPod Nano which allows for blank space creation.

The springboard hack is just the removal of a app and creation of a blank space. Not that amazing, but whats important is the bypass of Nano’s cache comparison, which compares any modded SB file and reverts it if it doesn’t like it, this opens up the possibility of hacking and modding, while not adding bootloaders or any of that fun stuff.

Basically what this means is that we could possibly soon see some cool new features coming to the iPod Nano such as Movies, TV Shows, Apps, Games, vCards, Calender events and so on, the references for which has been discovered in a plist file on the Nano. He also made a statement about this:

… in some of the device’s plists of reference to support of Movies, TV Shows, Apps, Games, vCards, Calender events and so on, with a few other cool things like a passcode lock. With the bypass I figured out, I hope to enable these pretty soon. It seems like the OS is a rehashed version of the previous Nano’s OS.

It is important to note here that the iPod Nano has notbeen jailbroken yet. Whelton has not gained root access to the device just yet. The discoveries made by Whelton has made him believe that the possibility of a jailbreak might exist. Here is what he had to say about the issue:

… the iPod Nano hasn’t been “jailbroken” as some sites claim, I do not have root access over the device. I did not “install” an app. I figured out how to remove them and insert a blank space into the springboard.

What I have also done is figured out a way for the iPod to boot with modified files (eg the SpingBoard Plist), bypassing the procedure it takes to stop this, I hope this will allow us to figure out a way to jailbreak it. I am primarily focusing on exposing some of the (for now) hidden features of the device.

You can stay tuned for more news and info on the topic by following us on Twitter and/or subscribing to our RSS feed.

[Source: MacStories]

Authors: _GadgetNews

to know more click here