901am

With all the fuss over Apple’s iPhone 4 signal woes, it looks like one engineer decided to put the iPhone 4 to the test against its older brother (iPhone 3GS) as well as its nemesis (HTC Nexus One).

While the article did admit that iPhone 4’s antenna was superior to its rivals untouched, it looks like “man’s most magnificent creation” is easily sullied by human hands.

It’s difficult to be exact about the data, since signal is very sensitive to direction, ambient conditions, and cell breathing. To generate these numbers, I measured at least 6 times and took the average. The results are pretty self explanatory. Inside a case, the iPhone 4 performs slightly better than the Nexus One. However, attenuation gets measurably worse depending how you hold the phone. Squeezing it really tightly, you can drop as much as 24 dB. Holding it naturally, I measured an average of 20 dB.

The drop in signal from cupping the device with a case on is purely a function of us being “ugly bags of mostly water.” A material which happens to be pretty good at attenuating RF – thus increasing path loss between the handset and cellular base station. There’s nothing Apple nor anyone else can do to get around physics, plain and simple. It’s something which demonstrably affects every phone’s cellular reception. (AnandTech) [Read more…]

Originally posted on June 30, 2010 @ 11:29 am

With media attention focusing on iPhone 4’s lack of signal for lefties, it looks like the folks at Cupertino have decided to confess their iSin and acknowledge the problem lies with (wait for it) the software.

[S]ome users have reported that iPhone 4 can drop 4 or 5 bars when tightly held in a way which covers the black strip in the lower left corner of the metal band. This is a far bigger drop than normal, and as a result some have accused the iPhone 4 of having a faulty antenna design. […]

Upon investigation, we were stunned to find that the formula we use to calculate how many bars of signal strength to display is totally wrong. Our formula, in many instances, mistakenly displays 2 more bars than it should for a given signal strength. For example, we sometimes display 4 bars when we should be displaying as few as 2 bars. Users observing a drop of several bars when they grip their iPhone in a certain way are most likely in an area with very weak signal strength, but they don’t know it because we are erroneously displaying 4 or 5 bars. Their big drop in bars is because their high bars were never real in the first place. (Apple Press Release)

Despite evidence showing that the problem is hardware related, Apple has chosen to throw its software team under the bus (which is Yankee speak for blaming someone else for your mistake). [Read more…]

Originally posted on July 2, 2010 @ 3:28 pm