I often find myself on the phone with someone who has an iPod Touch with a cracked screen and they frequently are not sure what kind they have. This makes sense since Apple doesn’t actually print the version number anywhere on the device. So the only way to identify them is through a variety of different physical characteristics.
For the purposes of this post we are only going to consider the 3 most popular models of the iPod Touch: 2nd generation, 3rd generiation, and 4th generation.
The easiest of these devices to identify is the iPod Touch 4 because, at the moment, it’s the only iPod Touch that has a camera. It has one on the front and one on the back. So if you or your son or daughter has an iPod Touch with a camera on it, they have the 4th generation device.
The 2nd and 3rd generation devices are much harder to differentiate because they look exactly the same. They both have a silver back with an oval shaped, black antenna cover in the top left hand corner. You can see that in the picture above. The only way to differentiate the two is to look at the model number which is engraved on the back. The 2nd generation iPod Touch has the serial number A1288 and the 3rd generation has the serial number A1318.
To summarize:
- iPod Touch 4th Gen: Camera on the front and back.
- iPod Touch 3rd Gen: Oval shaped antennae cover in the back, top left corner. Model number A1318.
- iPod Touch 2nd Gen: Looks just like the iPod Touch 3rd gen except the model number on the back is A1288.
At the moment, we at Chicago Smart Phone Repair are only repairing the cracked screens on all of the iPod Touch models. You can see a complete listing of this on our iPod Touch repair selection page.