Giz reader David Olivo wrote to tell us that he got his new hot iPod touch 16GB yesterday. And when he says hot, he means hot: "when I went to open the box, I found that it is actually HOT. I opened it, and found a weird screen menu staring at me. My iPod was on, on its own!" It was in factory test mode. This screen displays a hardware subsystems check, showing an "X" on Bluetooth. Whether that means the Bluetooth is disabled or nonexistent, we'll have to wait and see.
One may be the Infineon SGold-2, the chip that handles baseband communications and multimedia functions in the JesusPhone. The other one is CSR's Bluetooth chipset, which most probably has been eliminated from the iPod touch to reduce costs.
We will have to wait until the usual suspects open the touch's guts. However, looking at the factory test screens, this seems unlikely. In fact, we won't be surprised to learn that this factory mode is exactly the same as the iPhone's.
In any case, I am sure David doesn't care much about this right now:
it won't get me to the lovely iPod regular GUI!
We feel your pain, David. [Thanks David Olivo for his pics]