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Comment by tlack | Hacker News Reader

What you're saying does not make sense when you consider that this didn't happen with the previous iPhone.

If you read the blogs and apple's own letter, it does in fact happen with previous iPhones.

EDIT: again, why the downvote? To quote apple's letter: "To start with, gripping almost any mobile phone in certain ways will reduce its reception by 1 or more bars. This is true of iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, as well as many Droid, Nokia and RIM phones."

"..this mistake has been present since the original iPhone"

But this doesn't happen to the same degre as the iPhone 4. The iPhone 4's antennae placement makes this happen with a relatively standard hand position. I've tried this on a Pre and EVO, and I can't get either to do it, although I'm sure there must be some hand position where it happens -- but it shouldn't be one of the most common hand positions.

I don't disagree that the signal goes down if held in a certain position with the iPhone 4. I just think we might all not have noticed it had they not implemented the 3G signal meter "feature" in OS 2.1, since the signal degradation might be only 1 bar (see: anandtech's article with numbers). In real practice, my calls get killed because of the proximity sensor issue from my face, not the antenna degradation from my hand.

EDIT: again, why the downvote?

24 dB of loss is a staggering amount of power. Watt for watt, it means about 1/250 of the signal power is actually available to the phone's radio hardware when you hold it the "wrong way."

That is simply not acceptable regardless of what various blogs, experts, and apologists say. The fact that it was necessary for Ars Technica to hack the phone to obtain a quantitative figure at all is also damning.

In all honesty: do you feel the same anger about the Nexus One? If you feel Apple should recall or replace the iPhone 4, do you feel Google should do the same with the Nexus One?

I ask because -- per Anandtech's numbers -- the Nexus One can lose up to about 30% of signal strength depending on how you hold it. Which, while less than the iPhone 4 (which can lose up to about 38%), is still a rather large issue.

I'll admit I stopped reading when I got to the part about the iPhone 4 losing 24 dB when held a certain way. How does the article reconcile 24 dB (a 250:1 power ratio, or a 16:1 ratio expressed in terms of voltage) with 38%? These are two vastly different values.

The Anandtech article only gives the straight-up dB (iPhone 4 loses up to 24.6 dB, Nexus One loses up to 17.7). The percentages I thought came from it as well but I can't find them now; I'm currently hunting for the article I'd seen them in.

At any rate, the question stands and I'll just rephrase it in terms of just the dB numbers: is 17.7 dB OK but 24.6 dB not? If so, on what basis? If not, where's the outrage over the Nexus One?

And that's without getting into questions like "is it OK to lose a bit more signal if the ability to keep functioning on reduced signal has improved enough?"

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