Apple iOS 6 Launches, Though Not Without Some Problems

Apple fans will have to wait until tomorrow to get their hands on the iPhone 5. But in the meantime, there's another new Apple toy to play with.

Apple released its new operating system, iOS 6, to the public yesterday. The new system boasts over 200 new features (though in all honestly we'll probably just be making use of 5 at the most...) and is available for free on the iPhone 3GS and higher, as well as the iPad and the iPod Touch. Unfortunately, the upgrade didn't come without some problems.

A number of people encountered a major problem when trying to connect their newly-upgraded device to the wi-fi network.

Apparently, there were some users who complained that once the update to iOS 6 was complete, their freshly updated devices refuse to hook up to Wi-Fi networks that was once their close friend.

Apple did not release any comment on the issue when it cropped up on online forums, so trust users of iDevices to come up with a workaround. In theory, iOS 4 would ping a page on Apple’s servers, and if successful, the Wi-Fi was deemed to have connected, and everything is hunky dory. Needless to say, if the ping failed, the system would think you were on a network which needed a login and proceed with credentials authentication. It seems that Apple deleted that page from the server by accident, resulting in failed pings and subsequently, the inability to hook up via Wi-Fi.

The page has since been fixed, so if you were not able to upgrade iOS 6 yesterday, you should be free and clear to do so today. Still, I find it a bit unusual for Apple to make such a bone-headed error during the releases of a new product.  Let's hope this isn't foreshadowing anything about the iPhone 5's release.

Be sure and check out next week's edition of the Geek Girl Report, where I'll be taking a more in-depth look at iOS 6 and a few of its 200 new features.