Is Apple shipping out defective iPod iTouch 2G’s?

I have been noting that people have been blogging and writing about problems with iTouch wifi access for a few weeks now and now I have experienced it personally. I just bought two new 2G iTouches for my 14 year old twins for their birthday. Right out of the box the first one simply connected to my home wifi. The second kept giving me a login error “”Unable to Join Network Failure (error -3)” connecting to Wi-Fi”. I saw an article online that said that removing the password security from the wifi worked and sure enough, i could connect. However, I couldn’t leave it at that, because I didn’t want to leave my network unsecured.

So I figured it had to be software. I looked it up on apple support and noticed several articles and tried all their solutions. I reset the phone, I reset the network settings, I reset all data and settings, I did a restore from iTunes, I did a restore to 2.1, I did a bootstrap restore from iTunes, I rebooted my hub, I updated the firmware on my hub — all to no avail. Finally I called Apple support. For the first 10 minutes the agent tried to tell me that they had never heard of the problem before.

Before I continue, I have to admit that I am not very good with support agents. I tend to lose my patience with them quite frequently. I took a breath and I told them about the numerous web sites, forums, and blogs where people are complaining about this.

It is the questions like “are you sure that your wifi is running? and Are you sure you are entering the right password? and Are you sure you are awake :)? that get me everytime. This guy even suggested I go to the local starbucks and see if I could connect and when I explained to them that they didn’t use a password protected network, so it wouldn’t help, he got really confused.

He put me on hold and came back and admitted that after doing some research that it was a known problem caused by a defect in the iphone and that I would have to send it in for repair. Another deep breath or two and at least one expletive, I had them switch me over to Sales Support instead and case number in hand, I asked for them to exchange it for me. I got a shipping label today and they very nicely promised to ship the new one as soon as they saw that package was received by FedEx.

I’m worried that I’ll get another defective one, since the last one I just got two days ago so chances are the next one is defective too. But if I do, I’ll guess i’ll just have to call support again.