My iPad is possessed!

My sister was in Malaysia a couple of weeks back and saw an iPad 2 for AED 1650 so she called and asked me if I wanted one. I figured it was a good price to upgrade my wife’s old iPad and thus asked her to get one in white. She got one for herself and one for me.

When she passed it to me, I immediately noticed that the home button wasn’t working- it just wouldn’t take you back out of any application to the home screen. So I called her up immediately to see if her unit had any issues but she said that her’s was working completely fine. So here I was stuck with a non-working iPad that was purchased out of the country. I figured I didn’t have many options and randomly started pressing the home button- some times hard and some times real hard. Sadly, that didn’t help much. Only one time when I pressed the button really really hard did it work but trying to repeat that didn’t do anything.

With not many other options, I simply left the room and kept the iPad 2 to charge. Imagine my surprise when I came back after a couple of hours to find the home button working perfectly fine! I can press it to go back home or double press it to bring up the list of running applications just fine. I have no idea what happened while I was away but I wasn’t going to complain. You must be thinking that I am really lucky- but I’m not, as I now have another problem with the iPad. The easiest way to describe it is to say that my iPad is possessed!

Out of nowhere the screen starts shaking, applications start switching and random bits of text like fbgtlwbfurbskj appear get automatically typed by the keyboard. The iPad does this for a few seconds before returning back to normal. Needless to say, this can be extremely frustrating when typing an email. The following video shows what happens.

I googled this and there are quite a few people affected by this “ghost touch” phenomena. One of the recommended solutions is to discharge the unit completely which I will try tomorrow. If that doesn’t work then I’m not sure what I will do.

My point in writing this blog is that anyone can land with a faulty piece of equipment and it should not be surprising to see a turkey even if it’s from a company with an extremely strict quality check like Apple. What I advise you to do is buy it from an authorized distributor which can sometimes be a bit more pricey, but think of the difference as insurance against your expensive purchase. It’s totally worth it.