Steve Jobs on iPhone 4 Signal Issue: 'There are no reception issues'
macrumors.com
macrumors.com
It's going to be interesting to see how this all turns out, but I'm disappointed in many of the news sites who are now badging it as an issue with displayed strength. I have an iPhone 4, live in an area with good signal strength, and "bridging the gap" with my finger absolutely does decrease voice quality and decimate data throughput.
Sure. Because the previous iPhones were built like tanks and... oh, wait. They weren't either.
To me those two "coincidences" look more like exercises in damage control as the RMA flood kicks in.
My guess is that you misread my statement and thought I said that it reduces the signal to 10%. But I didn't say that, and in fact I gave the correct explanation in two ways to make sure I would be interpreted clearly.
What I do find interesting, however, is the need to utterly bash a product you will never buy, and never intended to, possibly because you believe your own brand of choice to benefit from that sort of commentary.
So, it's not just a question of brand, and I think there are some rational reasons to dislike Apple, which may cause irrational outbursts of nonsense.
I've yet to have the issue come up in a real world scenario. It's certainly not a problem for calling unless you hold your phone like a coconut shell to your head. It's more of a threat when you're using your thumb on the phone while holding it in your left hand. Perhaps my wife, friends, and family all have curiously shaped hands that find the required grip renders actual use of the uncomfortable.
Of course, in every other way the iPhone 4 seems to be an incredible smartphone; I suppose even if there is a problem requiring conscious thought for some people, it's on balance with the kinds of problems other handsets have. I mean, the battery life alone is something to drive upgrades: http://bit.ly/aeKf0n And the iPhone's past reception issues has been dramatically improved. I'm one of those unfortunates who has a home "sort of" covered by AT&T, and the difference between the iPhone 4's dropped/missed calls and the 3GS's dropped/missed calls is very noticeable.
This talk of fixing iPhone4 issues with an OS update makes me wonder the same thing. Maybe they'll just smooth/inflate the bars display.
This might be one of those situations where more information would be useful. The ideal solution would be to charge a higher price (e.g. a 'minute multiplier' — show this next to the signal strength indicator) for traffic in congested conditions — but this would present marketing problems, Mobile-phone pricing is already opaque enough, and people would rightly be suspicious that the introduction of such a congestion charge would soon result in interesting re-defintions of 'congestion'.
You might be able to get much the same effect by simply showing the user the current local network condition, by turning the signal indicator into a signal-and-congestion indicator. You'd see the signal strength as a measure of the radio conditions, and some kind of indicator that reflected the ability of the network to handle calls at that moment.
I'm assuming, with no particular knowledge of the matter, that the congestion problems with mobile-phone networks are like nearly all other such problems: extremely fleeting. You might be unable to make a call for about five minutes out of an hour; but if that's the five minutes during which you want to make a call, not only are you frustrated because you can only discover the situation through what amounts to black-box analysis, but the phone company gets no goodwill from you for the performance of the network during the other fifty-five minutes.
Congestion means they have lots of paying customers in the area -- so even without congestion pricing, they ought to be able to plan and maintain capacity here. That they have not is evidence of the lack of proper competition, aggravated by Apple's exclusive deal.
Over here we get annoyed when we stumble into an area without HSDPA coverage which makes our data-rate drop from 400 kB/s to around 30 kB/s...
But dropped calls and such are mostly an unknown. I can't remember having ever experienced one except when driving through a tunnel with the car. Our main network (t-mo) is pretty much everywhere until you drive really far out into the woods. Even in rural areas my phone gets to choose between 2-3 networks most of the time. Smaller networks have roaming agreements with t-mo, so phones just seamlessly switch as needed.
You americans have my pity.
Hands mess with cell phone reception. Every phone has an optimal way to be held so as to minimize this effect.
The difference with the iPhone 4 is that the optimal holding method is clear. If my signal is fine then I can cup the phone as normal but if I'm in a low signal situation I can give my phone the death grip to avoid touching the steel.
I have a hard time believing the shorting-the-antennas issue was unforeseen by Apple. I give a company that just pulled in a $63.5B year a little more credit.
Apple's is based around creating beautiful products with innovative new features. They have definitely done it again... but whether or not the external antenna feature in particular will be seen as innovative.. I guess we will have to "stay tuned".
One report[1] even claimed an iOS update as early as Monday might be able to relieve the issue due to a lag in the iPhone 4's ability to switch between frequencies causing the loss in signal.
(Even as most reports seem to indicate a complete disruption of service, rather than a simple “lag”.)
[1] http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/06/25/death_grip_hys... (To be a taken with a grain of salt, as should anything at AppleInsider that is uncorroborated.)
As in... has no-one created an app showing a real-time scrolling graph of reception level and an accurate (or as accurate as possible) number of the current reception level... perhaps with an overlay of the number of visible towers and strength?
Because if they did, then not only could it be proved by the layman but if the problem existed then the layman can visually see the effect and visually gain feedback on their techniques to find a better way to hold the phone.
If this doesn't exist, it sounds like a great cash-in app for right now. I'll take 2.5% of revenue for the idea.
(pun not intended, but it's apropos)
I'm not sure why everyone is complaining about this BP oil spill, I don't see any oil washing up on the beaches near me in the northeast, so it can't be THAT big of a problem, right?
I've also had no reception problems with my iPhone 4, despite trying everything I've read about or can think of to provoke them. Licking fingertips, grasping the phone in a position no human would ever use, sitting in my bathtub where I'd surrounded by several layers of metal lath, etc., etc.: I can get the indicated signal strength to drop somewhat (but not consistently), but I have never been unable to make a call during these experiments.
I am forced to conclude one of three things:
1. Message-board habitués are very loudly complaining about a tiny or nonexistent problem with an Apple product. This would be strange, because normally you can take all criticism of Apple and its products entirely at face value, and people never swarm out of the woodwork to complain about the performance of Apple products they don't own. Insert sarcasm punctuation mark here.
2. There is a design flaw, but it's a subtle one that results in a higher-than-expected rate of manufacturing defects, causing some people's phones to have more reception problems than one would normally expect.
3. The iPhone 4 performs about as well as every other mobile phone, which means: less than perfectly. Hype about the antenna means that this is resulting in an inordinate amount of public complaining.
Or, most likely: all three of those.