Antenna designer writes about the iPhone 4
antennasys.com
antennasys.com
"It's not a design flaw. Steve is just trying to bring gentility and good manners to mobile phone usage. The correct way to hold an iPhone 4 is with the thumb and index finger on either side of the phone, while extending the pinky outward as if holding a fine china cup (the pinky will also act as a supplemental antenna). Once the user is holding the phone like a Regency dandy, he will naturally tend to behave like one, showing the world what a well-mannered chap he is. Pure genius. "
It's like HN is my antenna for the internet.
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2454916...
I've had an iPhone 4 for two days now, and I have yet to be able to reproduce the problem; I even tried licking my finger and wrapping it around the bottom left corner, making sure to connect both antennas. I couldn't get it to drop even one bar.
This is not at all to say that it's not a real issue, but the sensationalism belies how little we know about it so far. Of course, people are going to delight in exploiting any chink in Apple's armor, especially today.
(And if the old method to access the field test mode hadn't been disabled, I'd be the first to give you dBm measurements.)
From a test right now, picking up my Blackberry 8100 (antenna along the bottom) in roughly the manner I would use to hold it to my ear, I lose about 10 to 15 dBm (from around -66 to -69 to around -79 to -81), which means the received signal power drops by around 10 to 30 times. I don't know if that's particularly good or bad; I've never had problems with dropped calls.
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/android/thread?tid=34a...
An app that instructs the user to pick up the phone and hold it to his head as he would while talking, records the RSSI over a course of a couple of minutes, then graphs or displays the results might be an interesting weekend project.
and put your phone in field test mode
(http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/iphone/iphone-field-test-mode-let...)
On my 3GS, I can vary up to 20 dBm depending on how I'm holding it, how I rotate myself and/or the phone, where I'm holding it in relation to my body, etc.
That strongly suggests to me that this is something over and above normal loss of signal caused by picking up in a hand.
Sir, We are not talking about newton's third law here. There could very well defective units or other factors come into play. So don't assume others are just lying liers
| So, naturally, the design evolved to meet requirements - and efficient transmission and reception while being held by a human hand are simply not design requirements!
This is analogous to saying driving experience doesn't matter as long as car pases emission tests which is certainly not true (I hope). People don't buy phones because it passes FCC testing they buy phones to make calls! If you don't factor human hand into your design, word of mouth will kill the phone.
I'm not so sure. Of all the complaints about AT&T consistently dropping calls, people are still flocking to the iPhone. I realize they don't have a choice, but once again, people are voting with their dollars. They're willing to accept a subpar network for a cool phone.
people are voting with their dollars. The design of the product is more important than its functionality (this is to say: the average consumer likes pretty things).
Whenever we hear a prediction about "word of mouth" stunting the sales of an Apple product, we have to take that statement with an iPhone-sized grain of salt. Word of mouth doesn't hurt recent Apple products. The Gizmodo "leaks" were word of mouth about this particular phone and Apple sold 1,000,000 phones today.
If you will think back a few months, "word of mouth" was that the 27-inch iMac had screen problems. That "word of mouth" amounted to thousands of posts on the Apple support site. Apple simply fixed/replaced the machines with problems, improving their reputation as a make-good company. I haven't heard any "word of mouth" about the iMac lately because the customers are satisfied and the FUD has evaporated.
When these iPhone problems are resolved, this entire thread will dry up and blow away in the wind.
The disconnect has always been there. People have always had immersion bias. That's why it goes by many names: Parochialism, regionalism, racism, class bias, tribalism.
It's fun to watch people blame the disconnect between tribal culture and reality on the Internet -- one could have predicted that; new technology tends to get blamed for anything and everything, no matter what the technology is -- but history is replete with examples of clueless, reality-disconnected people who managed to construct their bubbles without the benefit of any kind of networking tech. Lysenko didn't need the net. The pre-Revolutionary French aristocracy didn't need the net.
"Famous investigations into the most diabolical real-world cases in engineering."
The examples are really countless, auto crash tests and insurance safety ratings is a pretty good one, whereby "safety" has come to mean "safety to the occupants without any consideration of the risks to others".
I hope this isn't dangerous to your health.
He is buying one, so I assume not.
My JBL Pro speakers never have interference from my iPhone.
I have even remodeled my home to include a bedroom dedicated to my iPhone.
Totally worth it.
Does your 3GS say '3G' on the status bar while it's interfering with your speakers?
What was the definition of a heavy user?
About two hours … a month!
When this study was conducted (1999-2004), cell phone use had not yet exploded to the extent it has today. Now, the results are clearly outdated, because in the decade that's passed since the study was begun, cell phone use has grown exponentially and it is not at all unusual for people to use a cell phone for two hours or more a day!
What this means is that if you use your cell phone for two hours a month or more, you may be doubling your risk of a potentially fatal brain tumor. Use your cell phone significantly more than that, and your risk is likely much, much higher."
http://emf.mercola.com/sites/emf/archive/2010/06/10/how-the-...
Anyone got recent, non-biased studies on the same?
> Eligible cases were all patients with a glioma or meningioma of the brain diagnosed in the study regions during study periods of 2–4 years between 2000 and 2004.
So participants in the study lasted between 2 and 4 years. Since elevated rates of cancer were only found in the group with the highest usage[2], this means people with >=1640 hours of talk time, which means between 68 and 34 hours per month.
Not two hours per month. And this is easy to sanity check; here's the study again:
> Corresponding values for [median lifetime cumulative call time] glioma controls were 100 h lifetime, 2.5 h/month and about 2000 calls.
So the median user used about 2.5 hours per month, not the heavy user.
Now, let's hear them out a bit more:
> Overall, no increase in risk of glioma or meningioma was observed with use of mobile phones. There were suggestions of an increased risk of glioma at the highest exposure levels, but biases and error prevent a causal interpretation. The possible effects of long-term heavy use of mobile phones require further investigation.
It's also worth noting that you're using the word double somewhat duplicitously. Yes, the study found double the glioma rate in very heavy users (as discussed, much more than two hours per month), but it also found that the rest of cellphone users are less likely to get cancer than average.
If we take your causal analysis seriously, then we should also take this seriously: low to moderate cell phone usage grants instant partial immunity to brain cancer.
So, because the cancer rate in the study population excluding the highest usage group was .7 of what it is in the normal population, a rate of 1.4 times the normal population among heavy users is double the rate seen in the rest of the study population.
[1]:http://www.oxfordjournals.org/our_journals/ije/press_release... [2]:http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2010...
edited to add: Upon reflection, my analysis of the talk time is slightly wrong. The study means >=1640 hours lifetime cell phone usage. You can still use your cellphone 2.5 hours per month for 54 years before you reach this threshold.
Warning: Your Cell Phone May Be Hazardous to Your Health http://www.gq.com/cars-gear/gear-and-gadgets/201002/warning-...
Since the EM radiation you receive from your desk lamp is a thousand times more energetic?
Clearly his carrier isn't AT&T.