I have an iPhone and an iPad. The iPhone has broadband, a “personal hotspot,” and the service plan I pay for supports unlimited access to the internet. I’ve used the hotspot on my iPhone off and on for well over a year.
I just bought the iPad last week and it has wifi.
My plan was to use the iPad mostly for art show sales along with the Square system for CC processing. The iPad would use the Personal Hotspot on my iphone.
Last weekend, I was getting ready for my first show and updated the ios on both platforms to version 6. This was a Big Mistake. Evidently there is a problem with the personal hotspot, and while my iPad was able to find any number of wifi routers or “hotspots” in Apple parlance, it could not find the hotspot in my iPhone without having to do a bunch of time consuming tasks. This is with the iPhone being mere inches away from the iPad.
I did some reading on the web and at Apple’s support site, and according to many notes there is, *surprise* a problem that causes the Apple hotspot to not work properly with ios 6. There is no fix at this time other than to screw with the settings and hope that by doing so the problem will be resolved. Of course even when I was able to resolve the problem, as soon as the ipad went to sleep I had to repeat the dance. This was Very Frustrating and something that is intolerable during a show. In the end I was not able to use the ipad due to this.
I’m unimpressed enough to rate this a 5 star slap in the face by Apple.
I ended up installing using the Square system on my iPhone, and it worked fine. The iPad was rendered completely useless due to being phuched by Apple in this manner.
The lesson of this little rant is that if reliability is important to you, get cell service for your iPad.