Kinks in Apple iPad make the next version a better buy than release 1

Don’t get me wrong. I use the Apple iPad everyday but the frustrations tell me it’s not the simplistic computer solution for non-technical people. Apple advertise it was the magical computer for people who don’t want to fight with technology.

Problems and frustrations crop up daily until I am looking at product announcements for its replacement. 3G performance is too slow for browsing. The Wi-Fi will not reconnect to the router. I bumping up against videos and websites that won’t load because Steve Jobs doesn’t like Adobe Flash. The Bluetooth performance can drive you nuts when listening to music and the email application is useless.  

Since I have not been able to solve any of these problems with a casual fix or even a Google search for a fix, it would be a good assumption that novice users would be frustrated beyond belief with the iPad.

Two weeks ago the Wi-Fi stopped reconnecting with the router. So I turned on 3G data at home but that was hardly a good solution. You can’t watch videos very well on 3G because it’s too slow.

Most of my surfing starts with Twitter, which works amazingly well. On 3G the links come up so slowly I usually quit before the page is displayed. 30 to 60 seconds is far too long for web pages to load.

Last weekend I dedicated time to resolving the Wi-Fi problem. Apple knows about this: the when the iPad goes into sleep mode – every 5 minutes – it loses the Wi-Fi connection. If your home router is secured with a password,  iPad asks for the password. Sometimes that works but usually it doesn’t. The solution from Apple is to change security protocols, turn off network security or hold your iPad with two fingers while dancing a jig to Yankee Doodle Dandy.

We have two routers here – a secure one and an open one for guests. I can only run the iPad on the unsecured one which is an old dog that works poorly. That’s after reconfiguring the router several times. The reality is Apple hasn’t implemented Wi-Fi properly on the iPad and customers are left to sort that out for themselves.

The email client lost its settings so many times it is hardly useful to check email. All I get are cascading error messages when I try to get at the 43 unread email messages. That too is false since it reports email as unread even after it’s deleted from the mail server.

It would be nice if the whole world went along with Steve Jobs and switched to non-Flash video and websites but that hasn’t happened. The solution is to remember which sites don’t support the iPad and which do. I’m not sure if I have the bandwidth to remember all the things Apple says I should in their closed world.

Last is the failure of Bluetooth. The solution I worked out in Look Ma no hands iPad music results in dropped signal so much that the music comes in fits and starts. During the humid days last week, the iPad had to be line-of-site 2 feet from the Bluetooth receiver, not the 30 feet in the specification. Today there is no connection. Who knows why?

The Apple iPad is a great idea. It just needs to be implemented to work right day after day, not just during the first weeks. Mac fanboys excuse all this as part of the Apple mystique.