After recently getting a 5g ipod to replace my dead 1G I soon noticed that it didn’t quite work the same.
The most annoying loss of functionality was that you could no longer turn on and off the backlight by holding down the play(?) button. You now have to use a menu command, which is a little difficult to find in the pitch darkness. Apple, please bring this back.
A different issue was that it seemed like my ipod was losing its charge over night, but not every night. Sometimes it would go for days and allow me to turn it on, others, the play button would not start it up no matter what I tried. The weird thing was that it would wake up if you plugged it in to a USB port, and show a full charge.
I see others on the net have similar issues but there doesn’t seem to be a software/hardware fix for it.
What I have found out is this. In the case where the play button does not wake the ipod up, the center button will, if its held down for a second or two.
This is different behaviour than the 1G ipod’s, but may be “normal” operation for the 5G.