Upgrading to the Touch

So the other day my girlfriend offered up an interesting proposal to me. She would use her birthday money to buy my iPod Nano (at a slight discount) and I would spend an extra 50-70 bucks to upgrade to an iPod touch. Brilliant! But here’s the catch.

My iPod has been exhibiting…interesting tendencies since a couple weeks after I bought it. At random times the scroll wheel won’t respond to my delicate stroking. It will still move, but it randomly jumps around instead of smoothly scrolling. For example, if I’m trying to adjust the volume (and it starts out at max volume) touching it will cause the volume to jump down to the halfway mark, and then ‘scrolling’ the wheel will make the volume skip back and forth between the halfway mark and about the 3/4 mark. If I continue trying to move the volume up, the volume will continue to skip up and down the bar, slowly moving farther and farther down the bar with every jump until it mutes the sound.

Weird huh? The same thing occurs if I’m trying to navigate through the menu system. If the top menu choice is highlighted (i.e. ‘Music’ on the main menu), trying to scroll down to ‘Podcasts’ is nearly impossible. I have to scroll to the option, keep my finger on the scroll wheel at the desired position, then with another finger push the center button to go into the sub-menu. If at any time during the process I let up on the scroll wheel, the selection jumps back up to the top of the menu column.

Confusing enough? Yeah, if I could just get it to perform when I had my computer handy I’d take a video. In fact, I might just make that my mission this week. Anyway, if any of you guys have had, heard of, or even understand the problem I just described, let me know in the comments. Aaron suggests (and I agree) that I should just take it back to the store and see if I can exchange it. Hopefully that will go as smoothly as it does in my head.