Between the speaker and the 3.5 inch screen, I believe there is some sort of logical fallacy in Dustin Curtis' reasoning: the existing design is X, then we figure out some justification for X.
If you had started on an android phone, you would probably have written a similar piece talking about how apple phones get muted when placed on a fluffy blanket (as the edge gets covered), and how the android hardware designers did it right.
You should focus on talking about design tradeoffs irrespective of your current behavior. Reading about how you can't train yourself to place your phone face down, and that this is somehow a samsung design flaw, isn't interesting :-/
A 2nd grader's understanding of physics informs us that yes, indeed, there will be some situation in which the iPhone's speaker is obstructed and another speaker isn't (why, you could stand the phone up!). But what obstruction is going to be more common?
If frequency of obstruction isn't the only issue, what's the compensating virtue of having the speaker on the back of the phone? How valuable is that compensation?
I did a quick search to see if any of those issues have been talked about wrt iphones, and the top hit was http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=761725 ("when i listen at max volume [my iphone] is really bad. my nokia N82 compared is like a audiophile system") -- which I imagine is caused by the N82 having a larger speaker positioned on the back.
Puts the iphone 4 over 3g as ~3x quieter than a nexus s over 3g. (2g is closer, but no one I know uses their iphone 4 over 2g).
From the review: "For a long while, people have complained that the iPhone [3g & 3gs]'s speakerphone volume was too quiet... I'd say the iPhone 4's speakerphone is still loud enough, though calls over 3G are still a bit too quiet. Until Apple increases the gain on 3G calls, iPhone 4 customers who are hard of hearing should invest in a bluetooth headset."
Probably not since the rear speaker on the Android phone would be completely muted by the same fluffy blanket.
> Reading about how you can't train yourself to place your phone face down, and that this is somehow a samsung design flaw, isn't interesting :-/
If the user has to work around a problem with the design, that's a flaw.
Screen damage rates for iPhone 4 are far higher than Nexus S. I take it from your message that you believe this is due to a design flaw. Interesting... I suppose I agree.
> requires the user to adapt to something that could have been done correctly in the first place ... that's a flaw.
No, it couldn't have been done correctly in the first place. The iphone 4 sacrifices 66% of its speaker volume relative to the nexus s to get side placement. That's also a flaw. Design is about tradeoffs.
As for the speaker, if I have to set my phone face down to hear the alarm, that's a design flaw. If the Nexus designers believe that a louder speaker is more important, that's valid, but it's not valid if the extra volume is muffled when placed on a surface in the natural fashion.
Why the change from your earlier position of screen breakage indicating a design flaw?
> If the Nexus designers believe that a louder speaker is more important, that's valid, but it's not valid if the extra volume is muffled when placed on a surface in the natural fashion
Would you care to explain why you believe this and not the opposite? If you were hard of hearing do you think you would have written something like "If the iPhone designers believe that a side speaker is more important, that's valid, but it's not valid if the side speaker is too quiet for many users to hear"
We don’t know whether Apple considered that problem but it’s a problem nonetheless.
Various devices deal with this in various ways (by putting little ugly feet on the back as someone noticed, by slightly curving the surface on which the speaker is located, or as iPhone does it by placing it on a plane which in most scenarios sits perpendicular to the surface on which the device is resting).
Whether Apple's solution is the most elegant is also arguable but everyone is entitled to an opinion. One thing is for sure, this wasn't some obscure problem that no engineer has ever thought of until Apple decided to save us.
Instead, he shared a problem that he had with his Android – not that it wasn't like the iPhone, but that it didn't wake him up properly.
The rest of his piece put across a hypothesis that builds upon the problem.