Apple Acknowledges iPad Wi-Fi Issues, Sort Of
As Glenn wrote in “Some iPad Users Suffer Wi-Fi Woes” (6 April 2010), some iPad users (including me!) have experienced problems with Wi-Fi connectivity. These problems generally revolve around unexpectedly poor Wi-Fi signal strength, frequent Wi-Fi network dropoffs, widely varying network throughput, and repeated requests for Wi-Fi network passwords for remembered networks.
Apple has quietly updated a Knowledge Base article about issues that iPads have when connecting to Wi-Fi networks. Initially, the article offered only basic suggestions, like making sure your Wi-Fi router’s firmware was up to date, and using WPA or WPA2 instead of WEP. While I’m sure using current firmware and modern encryption approaches are a good idea, they really weren’t related to most of the problems.
In the updated article, Apple now suggests that having the screen brightness at its lowest setting could be related, which sounds truly weird. If anything, it would seem that having the screen brightness high would be more likely to cause interference with Wi-Fi, but increasing the screen brightness is certainly an easy fix to try.