Kindle SSID Trouble

Today, I unboxed my new Amazon Kindle (Wi-Fi). As it turned out, getting it to talk to my wireless router (an AVM FRITZ!Box 7270) was a little more difficult than expected. When connecting, all I got was a rather generic error message “Unable to connect to Wi-Fi network” despite correct settings and credentials. As it turned out later after fiddling around with my router settings, the Kindle does not like special characters in the SSID (in my case that was probably a slash or colon character - yes, I was using a URL as my SSID ;-)). After stripping them, everything started working flawlessly.