Is my iPad broken?

I experienced something new with my iPad today. For some reason I was not able to hear any sound from it. When I hit the volume buttons there were no little clicks and no visual cue that the volume was moving up or down. When I played video or audio there was no on-screen volume slider at all. My iPad seemed broken!

Thinking back to when the last time I heard anything from my iPad's built in speaker, I remembered that it was the night before, right before I watched a movie on my iPad. I decided to use headphones to enjoy a better movie watching experience with stereo sound. It had worked fine then, so, putting on my troubleshooting hat, I tried plugging the headphones back in, and it worked! Removing the headphones produced no sound again. For some reason my iPad decided that I could only hear sound with headphones now.

Searching the net I found a similar problem occurs with the iPhone too. So in the interest of anyone who might experience this little annoyance, I'll let you know how to fix this problem.

Reboot your iPad. Don't just tap the power button, but hold it down until you see the slider and then power it off. This did the trick for me. I read that for some people this didn't always work and that the solution was to repeatedly insert and remove the headphones until the problem is resolved.

It seems that if other iToys are having this problem, then maybe Apple should look into a fix.