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Comment by ericd | Hacker News Reader

If the vast majority of the people think it's overall a much better phone than the 3GS, is it really a badly designed phone?

I don't own one, but the whole antenna thing sounds massively overblown by a press hungry for some controversy. Anandtech went so far as to say that the phone was better overall in marginal reception areas than the 3GS.

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Mine was delivered Friday. One of the first things I did was to try the death grip. To get the signal to degrade I had to hold it in a position essentially embedding in the lower left corner of the phone in my palm while holding it unnaturally tight. Then there was only a single bar loss in signal. Holding the phone in a comfortable left or right handed position had no effect on the signal. If there would have not been the news around it I would have never noticed it. Even the technology press seems to be degenerating to Fox.

That's because you must be in an area with relatively high signal strength. The signal bars on the iPhone are very non-linear. If you had been in an area with marginal signal strength (but still enough to read 5 bars), holding your phone normally would be enough to drop several bars.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3794/the-iphone-4-review/2

This is fixed in the new update. The bars are now linear.

How can they be linear? There's an unbounded range of signal strength. Right next to a very high powered tower, it's going to get better signal strength than right next to a microcell, for example. My impression was that they were just shifting the scale so that more instances would be <5 bars.

That's a false dichotomy. It can still be better than a 3gs overall AND have a serious design flaw. Technology has moved on and made the 3gs obsolete in so many ways that it can easily move the overall experience to a new high watermark while still having a serious flaw.

If it gets better reception than the 3GS in some situations and worse in other situations, how is that a serious design flaw? What makes it a flaw rather than simply a design trade off?

I've had many high tech devices way more flawed than this and they didn't get 22 days of coverage, a press conference by the CEO, or some free fixes. Hell exploding laptop batteries got less coverage than this! I don't even own a iPhone (and don't intend to get one) but these comments are over the top.

The parent said it was a badly designed phone, I was just saying that since everyone seems to be much happier with it than the predecessor, even in the area of the flaw, it's not a bad design. I don't see a false dichotomy.

And the 3GS is not a completely obsolete phone at all, except by gadget addict standards.

Overblown or not, the product still have the flaw. I think what the media expected is Apple to admit the flaw, and not pushing the responsibility to customer by holding it another way or buy bumper.

In auto industry, Toyota, Honda and others admit their product have flaw, and do a recall.

In the auto industry, if they don't recall the product when there's a big flaw, people die. It's a bit different. This seems like the A/C buttons on a Toyota Camry being finicky and annoying. Not worth a recall, or the attention that's been paid to it.

Jobs admitted there was a flaw, just as there is for all phones. Perhaps they should recall all phones, and we can go back to having a pull out antenna, or large radio source closer to our heads?

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