As if I don't have enough on my plate this week, my iPhone has lost all wifi functionality. Since I use it as a remote and an entry system for my Remember The Milk "brain", and since there's next to zero cellular coverage where I live, the usefulness of this device has plummeted to more or less zero.
It started yesterday morning, when it started dropping the connection randomly. By the end of the day, it would only occasionally find the home (Apple) network, and when it did, it would often fail with "Unable to connect".
So I applied the
3.1 update which came out yesterday, which didn't exactly claim to address the issue, but did claim:
"Better iPhone 3G Wi-Fi performance when Bluetooth is turned on".
Naturally, after the update, it doesn't detect any wifi networks. Ever.
- reset your network settings
- reset your phone back to factory settings
- put it in flight mode for a while
- turn off bluetooth, then wifi, then
back on again (and various permutations of this)
- change your MAC address and restore
- put it in the freezer for 15 minutes (!)
I've tried resets, flight mode and bluetooth shenanigans, without success. I'm hesitant to put it into the freezer, because nobody seems to be able to explain clearly how this would work, and also it may invalidate the warranty. The iRecovery tool required to change the MAC address doesn't appear to work.
So tomorrow I'm taking it into an Apple store to see what's what...
The most annoying thing about all this is a useless device. The second most annoying thing is the utter lack of response by Apple. It's like this problem doesn't exist. After all, we're just consumers.
