I waited to upgrade to 2.2.1 on my first gen iPhone. I have learned my lesson with the iPhone updates that you never know what is going to happen. It was at least a week after release that I installed it because I hadn’t heard anything bad, but apparently I should have waited.

Since upgrading to 2.2.1 I basically have unusable WiFi on my iPhone. It will detect WiFi points, sometimes connect, but as soon as I try to use the connection it drops. I reset my router, changed a bunch of router settings, reset my iPhone (which takes a couple of hours) but it didn’t seem to solve the issue. So I finally headed over to the Apple Support discussion forums and found something interesting. I was not alone.

Apparently this is a fairly widespread problem and has been happening on all generations of iPhones and has been occurring just since 2.2.1 was released. Some of the people in the above-linked thread have had success by cooling their iPhone in the freezer and the WiFi starts working. Now I am not stupid enough to put my iPhone in the freezer, but I did set in the window sill, which is quite cool right now in our draft apartment.

After 5 hours of not being able to use WiFi on my iPhone, 20 minutes of sitting on the window sill and boom, WiFi is working. It didn’t last long, but it was working. Honestly, I thought it was a fluke. But I have been able to recreate this multiple times over the last week or so. Bizarre to say the least.

My biggest gripe is that Apple hasn’t acknowledged this. If you read the forum thread, people who have gone to the Genius Bar have been told to buy a new phone. Others have been told it’s their router. One thing I have learned in my (nearly) three years and an Apple user, is that Apple refuses to acknowledge problems or create quick fixes. So the best we can hope for is that version 2.2.2 of the firmware fixes this problem.

Of course, the worse part is that my warranty expired a day before I found this problem and I hadn’t bought the extra one year of AppleCare for the iPhone. Guess I paid for that one.