IPad Keeps restarting

Just an update - I took it back to the Apple store. The technician was wanting to blame a "rogue app", but I pointed out that
a) the only apps I currently have on the iPad and not on my iPhone were ones written by Apple.
b) I wasn't actually using it when it spontaneously started rebooting.
He then suggested it was because I had push email enabled.
Finally, he agreed to get it exchanged.
After he wandered off, the young lady who took my details confided that I was by no means the first to bring one back in this condition. Which made me wonder why the tech was acting like this was the first time he had seen it.

Anyway, after a week, the new one arrived. Plugged in the sim, synched with iTunes to restore my backups. And it worked fine.

For 24 hours, then the new one started doing it.

I have now removed the sim, erased it back to factory settings, and then re-synchronised with iTunes without inserting the sim. I'll see how long it goes without a sim, as the original one worked fine using only wifi with no sim installed.

Then maybe I'll pluck up the courage to go to Telstra for a sim rather than Vodaphone (everyone I know with an iPad using telstra sims has had no problem).

I think push notifications in combination with charging the device can cause the random restart

I'm having the same problem. No apple store near here, so I contacted customer support. Guess what they said "We've never heard of this problem before". Yeah right. I'm pointing her to this web page now.

I have both the 16gb wifi-only and the 64gb-3g ipad models. This only happens with the 3g one. Rebooting the device had no effect. Restoring the OS from a recent image also had no effect. The applecare people suggested replacing it. It's worth noting that turning off 3g (and location services, too, just for good measure) seems to be a short-term workaround. I've also experienced odd behavior with an IPhone 3Gs and this too was largely resolved by turning off 3g.

Hopefully this is just a software issue that will be resolved with a later update.

Very interesting - my iPad just started doing it as well, just after buying a prepaid Vodafone sim. And, after taking it out, it doesn't seem to be doing it any more.

Curious.

I have not had a problem with the iPad restarting, but I have a recent problem with apps shutting down when trying to do something. This is occurring more frequently and also has started occurring on my iPhone 3GS and 3G after updating to the 4.0 OS.

It is July 14th and I have this same problem since July 2nd. There seems to be a timing sequence to this, about every 5 minutes the ipad restarts itself. Or, it stops what it is doing (playing music) and returns to the main screen. I have already talked to Apple support, and already did a complete reinstall. From the reinstall, I put just a few songs back on, and just a few apps (but did not run any of them but ipod). It still does the same behavior, whether or not it is on the charger, connected to itunes, or unteathered.

Apple support suggested a bad image download into itunes, and that a reinstall does not re-download this image. Therefore, next I will have to try uninstalling itunes and reinstalling.

HOWEVER, just for grins, I turned off cellular service and wifi service, and the problem appears to have gone away. It has only been a few minutes, so this is unscientific. Next I will try turning them back on one at a time.

Update. Turning off wifi and cell service stops the rebooting. Here is a pattern:

wifi on, cell on, reboots every 5 min or so
wifi on, cell off, reboots every 5 min or so
wifi off, cell on, reboots every 5 min or so
wifi off, cell off, does not reboot itself

Condition: full reset, reload
Only 10 songs ripped from original CD on device.
No apps other than original.

It did the same behavior on iphone and ipad at the same time, just after the ios4 came out and was syncd to iphone.

From talking to others at my office today, their iphones are behaving the same way...burning battery very rapidly, and automatically shutting down apps or rebooting.

Just got the ipad today, updated to the latest 3.2.1 firmware, haven't even installed anything on it, and it keeps on restarting every 3 minutes 20 seconds. It doesn't matter if I'm using it or leaving it alone, it restarts to the Apple logo every 3+ minutes without fail!

I've reinstalled the firmware twice, reset to factory settings, erased data and reset...tried everything, and it still reboots automatically! Very disappointing!!!

At least you are one step ahead of me!

I unboxed by brand new 32G iPad, connected the wall plug.. constant restarting with the white apple logo.

If I hold HOME and put the plug in, I get the itunes logo and the cord..

If I repeat with the USB into the computer to set it up for the first time, the device is not recognised and doesn't power up at all.

Being a Sunday tomorrow my MAC reseller isn't open! grr

Having the exact same problem on my 3G 64GB. My wife's WiFi 16GB is not having the problem. I've just turned off push email and am starting to test. Whatever's wrong it's specific to the 3.2.1 upgrade the device worked perfectly on 3.2. If all else fails I'll try to restore to that image (has anyone done that successfully?)

Ok I seem to have stumbled onto the solution for this. After restoring several times to a backup of my previous configuration without fixing the problem, I decided to restore as a new iPad and systematically recreate my configuration to determine where the problem was. The interesting thing was that after restoring everything except my apps and media, it still wasn't restarting like it was previously. I decided to then go back to my original image (which was consistently causing the restart) and start removing apps and thereby their notifications, although I never got that far...

When I restored to my original backup this time, it's not having any problem at all. So the "trick" seems to be to do a "clean" restore, then do a restore to your original image.

To be thorough, here are the actual steps I followed:

1. Selected the "Restore" button in iTunes
2. When prompted to set up as a new iPad or restore from a previous backup, I selected set up as a new iPad (I named it "Restored iPad"). I also unchecked the media sync and application sync checkboxes in iTunes
3. I set up my MobileMe account and enabled all options including Find My iPad (thinking maybe "Find My iPad" was the problem)
4. Logged into me.com on my MBPro and launched "Find My iPad". Found the iPad with no problem.
5. I then set up my Exchange Server account (to an Exchange Server 2003) with all options except Contacts enabled.
6. Launched Mail on the iPad and verified both MobileMe and Exchange mail was working (Push mail was enabled by default and I left it)
7. Opened iTunes and clicked the Restore button again
8. This time I selected the original device name as the restore source

After the restore, the device is 100% fine, at least so far. If anything changes I'll update the post. If anyone tries this with success please pass on the info.

One note: If someone who's still having the problem could recreate it and grab their device log from xCode's Organizer window or from the iPhone Configuration Utility would you please send it to me? I opened a bug report before I started testing it and Apple has asked for a device log, which I can no longer provide since my machine is no longer having the problem (actually to avoid receiving these down the road, consider this request only open until July 23, 2010 🙂

<Edited by Host>

Possible Solution:
Delete any outgoing emails in your outbox queue while your iPad is up. Possible corrupted email causing the restarting issue.

Background:
I had the restarting problem and actually booked a genius bar appointment to get it looked at. In the interim, I could surf or email for 5 minutes at a time, so I was looking at my email and saw I had 2 unsent messages. When mail attempted to send these it crashed the app.

I then deleted the outgoing mail messages, and mail didn't crash, but on top of that, the iPad became stable again and hasn't restarted itself since!

Same here! 64 GB wifi-only ipad 3.2.1 and since day 1 ive been getting random reboots in settings or the app store... mostly in apples apps though surprisingly. Because when its not an apple app itll usually just crash because the ipads crappy 256mbs of ram cant handle the amazing ipad games. WHY DOES THE IPAD NOT HAVE 512mbs OF RAM?