The iPod Nano hacking frenzy seems to have just started, as it was hacker/developer James Whelton who first announced that a Springboard hack on the Nano was possible. Following suit of Mr. Whelton, another iPhone developer and hacker Steven Troughton-Smith claims to have discovered DFU mode in the 6th-gen iPod nano which is akin to the one found in the iPhone and iPod touch.
Steven Troughton-Smith says in his blog that:
Discovered what may be DFU mode: hold down the restart buttons until you get a black screen (it reboots twice) and iTunes sees the device and alerts you.
Afterwards, modified iRecovery to work with the iPod nano (had to add its DFU/Recovery USB ID) and allow it send files, and tested with some files I had extracted from the iPod nano 6G firmware (using the extract2g tool somewhere from http://www.freemyipod.org/ ).
disk.fw and osos.fw work (one boots disk mode, the other boots to a homescreen). The other files make the nano boot to a white screen, but go no further.
So, basically, it seems we can send encrypted firmware files to the iPod, and have them execute, similar to what is used to jailbreak the iPhone. If the nano rejects the file (i.e. unsigned, invalid), it reboots.
While this by itself isn't that cool, hopefully the info will inspire someone else to finally hack this thing and give us custom 'apps'.
So one can expect the ability to load apps and custom firmware files to the iPod Nano in the near future, however it should be kept in mind that the jailbreak has not been achieved as yet, due to the fact that there is no root access to the device, regardless of that, check out the video below to see Steven’s discovery:
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If you are willing to perform the Springboard hack on your iPod Nano, have a look at the tutorial we posted here.