Can anyone provide technical articles discussing the iPhone 4's antenna? How it compares to other phones, for example.
There are too many anecdotal stories. Personally, I'd like to see the issue quantified.
There are too many anecdotal stories. Personally, I'd like to see the issue quantified.
Edit: Here's a pertinent quote from that article...
"So, an entire day and more than a quarter tank of gas later, here are the results. Holding the iPhone 4 without a case, in your left hand, crossing the black strip can result in a worst case drop of 24 dB in signal. As we'll show in a second, how you hold the phone makes a huge difference across every smartphone - and we've tested thoroughly in 5 different positions.
Now, there are two vastly different possibilities for what happens to the bar visualization after you drop 24 dB. I happen to live less than one block from an AT&T UMTS tower (it's across the street, literally), and have exceptionally strong signal in all of my house - it's part of why I chose to live here, actually. Signal is above -65 dBm in every single room, in most cases it's at -51 dBm. When I incur that worst case drop of 24 dB from squeezing the phone, I fall down to -83 dBm, which is still visualized as 5 bars.
However, in locales that have less signal, but where iOS still displays 5 bars, the drop of 24 dB is visualized much differently. For example, at another test location, signal without holding the phone is -89 dBm, which is still displayed as 5 bars. Cup the phone, and you'll fall all the way to -113 dBm. All the bars dramatically disappear one after the other, people think they've dramatically lost all the signal, and you know the rest."
This fudging means that in a few cases, squeezing the phone will lose all the bars, not just 1 or 2.
Now, they don't deserve to be beat up over their antenna design - they get better signals than the old iPhones, even if you hold them wrong. They do deserve to be beat up for fudging the bar calculations.
I guess that's karma - dishonest behavior highlighted a minor design flaw, and now everyone is hung-up over the minor design flaw.
The same thing happened to Intel with the Pentium 5 FDIV bug. By denying it, Intel turned a trivial bug into a major PR fiasco. Don't forget, it required a floating point division with TWELVE significant digits to trigger the bug.
The only reason that it became a huge PR fiasco is that when a scientific researcher ran into it, Intel tried to hide it.