Easiest way to detect Internet connection on iOS?

I know this question will appear to be a dupe of many others, however, I don't feel the simple case is well explained here. Coming from an Android and BlackBerry background, making requests through HTTPUrlConnection instantly fail if there is no connection available. This seems like completely sane behavior, and I was surprised to find NSURLConnection in iOS did not emulate it.

I understand that Apple (and others who have extended it) provide a Reachability class to assist with determining the network state. I was happy to first see this and fully expected to see something like bool isNetworkAvailable(), but instead to my surprise I found a complex system requiring notification registrations and callbacks, and a bunch of seemingly unnecessary details. There must be a better way.

My app already gracefully handles connection failures, including no connectivity. The user is notified of the failure, and the app moves on.

Thus my requirements are simple: Single, synchronous function I can call before all HTTP requests to determine if I should bother actually sending the request or not. Ideally it requires no set up and just returns a boolean.

Is this really not possible on iOS?

I did a little more research and I am updating my answer with a more current solution. I am not sure if you have already looked at it but there is a nice sample code provided by Apple.

Download the sample code here

Include the Reachability.h and Reachability.m files in your project. Take a look at ReachabilityAppDelegate.m to see an example on how to determine host reachability, reachability by WiFi, by WWAN etc. For a very simply check of network reachability, you can do something like this

Reachability *networkReachability = [Reachability reachabilityForInternetConnection];   
NetworkStatus networkStatus = [networkReachability currentReachabilityStatus];    
if (networkStatus == NotReachable) {        
    NSLog(@"There IS NO internet connection");        
} else {        
     NSLog(@"There IS internet connection");        
}

@BenjaminPiette's: Don't forget to add SystemConfiguration.framework to your project.

Seeing as this thread is the top google result for this type of question, I figured I would provide the solution that worked for me. I was already using AFNetworking, but searching didn't reveal how to accomplish this task with AFNetworking until midway through my project.

What you want is the AFNetworkingReachabilityManager.

// -- Start monitoring network reachability (globally available) -- //
[[AFNetworkReachabilityManager sharedManager] startMonitoring];

[[AFNetworkReachabilityManager sharedManager] setReachabilityStatusChangeBlock:^(AFNetworkReachabilityStatus status) {

    NSLog(@"Reachability changed: %@", AFStringFromNetworkReachabilityStatus(status));


    switch (status) {
        case AFNetworkReachabilityStatusReachableViaWWAN:
        case AFNetworkReachabilityStatusReachableViaWiFi:
            // -- Reachable -- //
            NSLog(@"Reachable");
            break;
        case AFNetworkReachabilityStatusNotReachable:
        default:
            // -- Not reachable -- //
            NSLog(@"Not Reachable");
            break;
    }

}];

You can also use the following to test reachability synchronously (once monitoring has started):

-(BOOL) isInternetReachable
{
    return [AFNetworkReachabilityManager sharedManager].reachable;
}