iPad Review – Great apart from the broken WIFI

The iPad is a lovely device. It hasn’t made me any cleverer or better looking yet (but then I’ve not had it a day) but it is nice to use.  The screen is great to look at. Browsing web sites is a doddle (until you bash up against somewhere that uses Flash). The applications that you can buy look like they will be really quite useful. And number one wife quite fancies one too. The battery life looks good as well.

As of last night I loved it. This morning, when I woke it up and found that it no longer recognised my WIFI at home, I’m a bit less enamoured. I’d read about these problems when the iPad came out in the ‘states, but I presumed they would have fixed them before I got mine.

They haven’t.

I had to leave the house for work before I could do too much fiddling, and the iPad found the university network and is working fine at the moment, but I’m expecting a tussle when I get home. I’ll probably get around this by hard-wiring the network settings and with a bit of luck this will fix it. Otherwise I’ll have to wipe all the connections and re-connect. I can live with this, at a pinch, but I’m sure that number one wife wouldn’t like it much, along with anybody else expecting to buy an appliance.

I went onto the Apple support site and they have acknowledged there is an issue here, which is nice.  They then said it might be a problem with “Third Party” – i.e. not made by Apple – routers. I found this a bit irritating to be honest. If I have twenty devices (and I must have used that number of WIFI devices at home over the years) and the 21st one doesn’t work I’m more inclined to blame the new device than anything else.  Some of the suggested remedies (“Turn down the brightness”, “Hold the device above your head”, “Stand on one leg” etc) strike me as a bit daft when the proper solution is “Get Apple to replace the driver software with some that works”.

My advice, for what it is worth, is don’t turn your iPad off. I shut mine down last night and the reboot is the thing that seems to have broken it.  Of course you might get the same effect when you wander in and out of range of your “Third Party” access point. Oh well.