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Comment by gjm11 | Hacker News Reader

Brief summary of what they've said so far:

1. Similar things happen to all smartphones. (They had videos showing them happening to many other smartphones.)

2. This isn't making lots of people return their iPhones. (Return rate ~ 1/3 that of 3GS at the same point in its life.)

3. The iPhone 4 does drop more calls than the 3GS, but by less than 1%. (Not clear whether that's 1% of all calls or 1% of calls dropped on the 3GS.)

4. They're going to give everyone a free case and refund everyone who's bought one from them.

5. They've got improvements coming up for the proximity-sensor problems some people have had.

6. That's about it.

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It's 1% of all calls: http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2010/07/iphone... . Am I the only one that thinks that's actually a lot?

If the norm is a 5% drop rate, that's a 20% increase.

If the norm is even higher, then the increase is less as a percentage, but no wonder ATT won't release the numbers.

If my family and friends' experience is any indication, the drop rate is over 50%. So it's probably going from 55% to 56%: horrible to a teensy bit more horrible.

I live in Los Angeles. There are cell towers uglifying the sky everywhere. My favorites are the mock trees -- one in Burbank is a squat, fake palm tree with "coconut" repeaters. And despite the apparent ability to put towers absolutely anywhere... AT&T still blows.

Your friends and family have one out of every two calls dropped?

It's comical. I call home when I leave work. We might talk for five or ten minutes as I drive. This requires two or three calls, due to the drops -- on a major freeway with five bars of reception.

My family and friends have similar issues. A couple don't have it so bad because they're on the West Side, where AT&T seems to have built more towers -- gotta keep Beverly Hills & the movie studios happy, you know.

Oddly, we have little trouble with 3G data. I can stream podcasts and use Google maps simultaneously. It's the calls that are the issue.

I have a weird theory about that, actually. I have seen some similar issues in the Seattle area when moving from one part of the city to the next; the signal is at full strength, but the call suddenly drops, almost as if I'm crossing a boundary. Now, I preface this by saying I know little to nothing about the cell phone network handles calls, but thinking about this made me wonder if it had anything to do with handing off the connection from one tower to the next. Maybe it's better to have fewer, higher power towers to minimize hand-off than many low powered ones. Of course, that's exactly what most people don't want: high powered cell towers blasting them with radiation.

But I have to wonder if this problem is exaggerated by the 3G connection maintained by the phone. My dad used to have the same problem in NY (not the city), but he switched to edge and stopped dropping the calls. He just turns on 3G when he knows he wants to do some faster web browsing, which is rarely for him. Maybe you could try turning off your 3G and see if it reduces your problem in LA?

I wonder if it could be skewed by everyone testing it out and trying to get calls to drop.

Considering that people constantly complained about call reception and dropping on the 3GS and the iPhone 4 was heralded as the solution?

Yes, I was shocked. I thought Apple handled this all well, but I was really expecting them to say that the "iPhone 4 still provides better reception than the 3GS". I guess they can't actually make that claim and I still find that a bit funny.

Actually, they could still make that claim, and it goes along with my personal theory about the higher drop rate.

The measurement provided was simply the "drop rate" per 100 calls. Implicit in this is that it's the drop rate for successfully connected calls, since a call that never connects can't be dropped. I believe that the iPhone 4 is more sensitive and has better reception than the 3GS. There are rooms in my house where I get 0 bars and I can't make a phone call on the 3GS but I can successfully make calls on the iPhone 4.

So let's say I try to make 100 calls, but the reception sucks in some rooms so on the 3GS only 80 calls successfully connect and of those 4 get dropped. That's a drop percentage of 5% or 5 our of 100. But let's say on the iPhone 4 I'm able to successfully connect on all 100 calls, but since the signal is so low in some of the rooms, I drop 10 of the calls. So 10% or 10 out of 100.

So I've now got a drop rate that's double the 3GS, even though I'm able to make 10 more completely successful calls per 100.

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