don10ged wrote:
Don't know if this is relevant for you. I got my i-phone last September and couldn't get the wifi to work. To cut a long story short, I was told that i-phones use WMA, and most Routers on PC's use WMA2. I had to regrade my PC router/wifi connection back to WMA, and all worked perfectly. Had to redo my families laptops as well to get them to work. I'm 54 and not particularly IT literate, but I managed it, so must be fairly simple to do.
@don,
I thing you are referring to "WPA" and "WPA2" (the acronym stands for "WiFi Protected Access").
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-FiProtectedAccess
The acronym WMA generally refers to "Windows Media Audio".
I don't know who gave you the advice about all iPhones only being compatible with WPA, but I can assure you they were mistaken. I have an iPhone 3G and a number of different WiFi Access Points at my home. One (a Linksys) is configured with WPA. Another (an Apple Airport Express) is configured with WPA2. My iPhone connects to either of them quite happily. I'm using it on the internet right now with WPA2.
It's true that some older WiFi gear won't support the WPA2 protocol. I have an old IBM T42 ThinkPad running WinXP. It won't speak WPA2, which is why I keep my Linksys router configured with WPA. It's plausible that the 1st-gen iPhone couldn't do WPA2, but the 3G can. According to Apple, the 3GS and the iPhone 4 are also compatible with WPA2 (assuming the iPhone 4's antenna is able to capture the signal...)
This Apple support article provides some additional information on WiFi compatibility, and also confirms that iPhone works with WPA and WPA2.
http://support.apple.com/kb/ts1398