The iPhone has taken America by storm since its much-vaunted release. The rest of the world is slowly working on giving a crap, but to the States the iPhone represents the current holy grail of their mobile phone industry. New handsets with high expectations are relentlessly branded ‘iPhone killers? though has any phone even come close to knocking the iPhone from its pedestal in the minds of its users? Not even close.

However, during these times of economic uncertainty, a little bit of fiddling you can give your iTouch essentially the same features as the iPhone. Sure, you won’t have an inbuilt camera, but you can’t send MMS messages or record video anyway, so what are you really missing out on? The kink in the plan here is that you need to be in range of a Wi-Fi hotspot to use your iTouch-Phone, but with the ever-increasing number of public hotspots, it’s likely that if you live in an urban area you’re probably not too far away from one most of the time. The only money you’ll need to spend is on a microphone, since sadly the iPod Touch has no built-in mic.

The great news is that besides having to spend a bit of cash on your microphone solution, all the software used in this tutorial to give your snazzy iPod Touch the functionality of the iPhone is totally free. So what are you waiting for?

There’s no need to jailbreak your iTouch or modify it in any way ?all you need is an iPod Touch on 2.x.x firmware, a pair of headphones with a microphone, a WiFi network, and access to Apple’s App Store so you can download and use Fring ?a free app which supports several different chat protocols.