Follow these simple rules:

Everything else you need to know is in Chapter 1.

If the iPod touch display has excessive moisture on it from humidity or wet fingers, wipe it with a soft, dry cloth. If it's dirty, use a soft, slightly damp, lint-free cloth — an inexpensive eyeglass cleaning cloth sold in vision care stores or pharmacies is a good choice. By no means should you use window cleaners, household cleaners, aerosol sprays, solvents, alcohol, ammonia, or abrasives — they can scratch or otherwise damage the display. Also, try not to get any moisture in any of the openings, as it could short out the device.

Use your iPod touch as a workout companion with Nike+ running shoes and a Nike+ iPod Sport Kit. Its sensor fits inside your Nike+ shoe under the insole. The current-generation iPod touch includes a receiver, but the first-generation iPod touch requires a separate receiver.

When you have the kit and the shoes, activate the app on your iPod touch — choose Settings

Ratings are useful — the Shuffle and Genius features are influenced by ratings, and you can define smart playlists with ratings to select only rated songs so you can avoid the clunkers and spinal tappers. In fact, when you try to put a music library on your iPod touch that's larger than the device's capacity, iTunes decides which songs to synchronize based on — you guessed it, ratings.

iTunes lets you rate your songs, but so does your iPod touch. You can rate any song on your iPod touch as you listen to it. Ratings you assign on your iPod touch are automatically resynchronized back to your iTunes library when you connect your iPod touch again.

To assign a rating to a song on your iPod touch, follow these steps:

You can turn off the synchronization of certain apps in your iTunes library before syncing your iPod touch to iTunes, as I describe in Chapter 5, so that the apps disappear from your iPod touch. But you can also delete apps directly from your iPod touch.

Touch and hold any icon on the Home screen until all the icons begin to wiggle (as if you're about to rearrange them or add Home screens). To delete an app, tap the circled X that appears inside the app's icon as it wiggles. Your iPod touch displays a warning that deleting the app also deletes all its data; tap Delete to go ahead and delete the app and its data or tap Cancel to cancel.

To stop the icons from wiggling, press the Home button on the device, which saves any changes you made to your Home screens.

Need more room on your iPod touch? You can delete a video or podcast episode directly from your iPod touch by flicking left or right across the video or podcast episode selection and then tapping the Delete button that appears, as shown in Figure 15-1.

Your video or podcast episode is deleted from your iPod touch only. When you sync your iPod touch with iTunes, the video or podcast episode is copied back to your iPod touch. If you want to prevent the video or podcast episode from appearing on your iPod touch after syncing, deselect it first before syncing your iPod touch, or switch to manually managing music and videos, as I describe in Chapter 5. Note: If you delete a rented movie from an iPod touch, it's gone forever (or until you rent it again).

Figure 15.1. Flick left or right across the video or podcast episode to see the Delete button.

The Maps app not only shows you the route to take, but in some areas it can also show you traffic patterns so you can avoid the jams. The traffic data is constantly updated and aggregated from a variety of Internet sources by Google. It is available for more than 30 major U.S. cities, including New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Washington.

To use Maps, tap the Maps icon on the Home screen. The Maps app appears (refer to Chapter 12). You can obtain directions first, as I describe in Chapter 12, or just display any location on the map that has highways. To show traffic information, tap the Underneath button (the curled page icon in the bottom-right corner) to see a menu underneath the map and then tap Show Traffic.

When the map shows traffic, highways are color-coded according to the flow of traffic:

If you don't see color-coded highways, you may need to zoom out to see highways and major roads.

To stop showing the traffic, tap the Underneath button and then tap Hide Traffic.

You can turn on keyboards for different languages and use them simultaneously. To turn on international keyboards, choose Settings

You can turn on any of the keyboards you need — tap Off to turn each one on. To access languages with more than one keyboard, such as Japanese, tap Japanese first and then tap the specific keyboard layout (QWERTY or Kana).

Figure 15.2. Turn on international keyboards.

You can then switch keyboards while typing information by tapping the globe icon, as shown in Figure 15-3, that appears to the right of the .?123 key when more than one international keyboard is turned on. The language of the newly active keyboard appears briefly in the spacebar.

Each time you tap the globe icon, the keyboard layout switches to the next language you've turned on, in the order that they appear in the international keyboards list.

For example, if you turned on English, English (UK), German, and Japanese Kana (for a total of 4 keyboards), tapping the globe icon switches from English to English (UK). Tapping it again switches to German, and tapping it again switches to Japanese Kana. Tapping the globe icon one more time switches back to English.

To use the Japanese Kana keyboard, use the keypad to select syllables. For more syllable options, tap the arrow key and select another syllable or word from the window. With the Japanese QWERTY keyboard, you can use the QWERTY layout to input code for Japanese syllables. As you type, suggested syllables appear, and you can tap the syllable to choose it.

Figure 15.3. Switch to another language.

The iPod touch offers keyboards for both Traditional and Simplified Chinese, with Handwriting and Pinyin layouts for both. Turn on international keyboards as described in the preceding section and tap Chinese (Simplified) or Chinese (Traditional). Then tap Off to turn on Handwriting or Pinyin. (You can turn both on.)

For the Handwriting layouts, use the touchpad to enter Chinese characters with your finger, as shown in Figure 15-4.

As you draw character strokes, matching characters appear in a list, with the closest match at the top. When you choose a character, its related characters appear in the list as additional choices.

For Simplified Pinyin, use the QWERTY keyboard to enter Pinyin for Chinese characters; as you type, suggested Chinese characters appear. Tap a character to choose it or continue entering Pinyin to see more character options.

Figure 15.4. Drawing Chinese characters.

Your iPod touch remembers your Wi-Fi connections and automatically uses one when it detects it within your range. If you've used multiple Wi-Fi networks in the same location, it picks the last one you used. (For details on choosing a Wi-Fi network, see Chapter 4.)

But if your iPod touch keeps picking up a Wi-Fi network that you can't properly join, such as a private network that requires a password you don't know or a commercial network that charges for access, you can tell your iPod touch to forget this particular network, rather than turning off Wi-Fi itself. This is very useful if a paid service has somehow gotten hold of your iPod touch and won't let you move on to other Web pages without typing a password.

Choose Settings