iPhone 4 Review: 1 - Hardware Fit & Finish - Page 9

You forgot dainty, demure and refined!

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That's always possible. I wish my daughter was at that age. Well, maybe not dainty.

It's not quite like that... There are some sheeple that always make excuses for Apple, and say they didn't what a particular lacking feature, and those people are just silly, but some things have explanation/merit:

No flash: Well, any phone that actually does have it crashes and slows to a crawl. I support the push for HTML5. I'm okay with no Flash, and I actually quite enjoy surfing without it.

No mms: Total screw up. Should have had that on day 1.

No tethering: AT&T's fault. iPhone in other countries has had tethering.

AT&T exclusive: Double edge sword. No other carrier was willing to make the back end changes to support the feature set of the iPhone. The exclusive deal made the iPhone platform (and now the rest of the smartphone industry) possible. It's unfortunate that AT&T has coverage problems. I've been on Verizon before though, and believe me, it's no picnic.

"Don't hold it that way": Could be the stupidest thing Jobs has ever said. What a bonehead remark. This antenna thing is a real problem, but appears to be easily alleviated. He should have said "we're working on that" and then given out free bumper 'cases' to anyone who is affected by the problem.

I pretty much agree with everything you said here. I do want to point out though that other phones have this problem to a greater or lessor extent. Other phones do have, in their manual, how to hold, and how to NOT hold the phone.

The problem with Job's reply is his famous brevity. Sometimes that's good, and sometimes, as in this case, it's bad.

It's amusing that Nokia posted a page showing a bunch of awkward ways of holding their phones, with odd reasons why you would want to hold them that way, saying that it doesn't matter how you hold their phones.

But shortly afterward, instructions from one of their manuals showing that you did need to know how to hold their phone showed up. And then a bunch of posts on various Nokia phones also showed up telling of how they had that same problem.

I Think that if Jobs was more careful in how he worded it, it would have been fine.

I didn't mean you per se. Was just a statement. Sorry if you thought I meant you because you were quoted.

You brought up the Magic Mouse (I didn't), and you stated:


To me that statement isn't true. You know what I hate? People telling me how to behave. You can call me a troll as you want. I just expected Apple to fix the issue they didn't. The got rid of the ball, which sucked, but they didn't fix the right-click issue. I couldn't care less if you went to a pen forum and complained about that, that's your business.

What you actually hate is people pointing out flaws with Apple products. I doesn't bother me, 'cause if I see a fault I want Apple to fix and make all their products great. The ball on top of their mouse was a bad design, and this method of right-clicking is also bad. Thankfully they have negated the ball issue, but have kept the awkward implementation of right-clicking around.

Didn't you catch the name of this website? Nevertheless, I see plenty of negative comments. AppleInsider seems to attract its fair share of Apple haters.

So you'll do yourself a favor by moving along.

+1

Except maybe he shouldn't be replying at all to peeps he doesn't know?

Mostly it seems to work out well. He's been praised in the press for being open, and an example for other CEO's. But with this one reply, he made mistake in the way he worded it.

Yeah, Jobs' answer was definitely not the best, but really... You think the antenna issue is going to be what slows down sales? I seriously doubt that. Sales are going to slow down over the next couple weeks simply due to a lack of supply. I like Apple as a company, but this review was WAY over the top and I'm definitely not that much of a fanboy. That said however, I have confidence that Apple will have a software fix for the bulk of the issues and if there are some hardware issues with a few phones beyond that they will swap those units. Seriously, who isn't going to get some kind of case for the phone anyway? Yeah, you shouldn't have to have a case to avoid the antenna issue, but if that fixes it and your going to get one anyway what's the big deal?

Personally, I think we may have possibly gotten a defective unit. The new phone is my wife's and it did something weird at dinner a couple nights ago. The phone started vibrating as if you had it on silent with an incoming call. The problem was that it never stopped. We couldn't unlock the phone, the display just stayed blank. We couldn't power off the phone either. It was really odd. We took the phone back and they did a hard power off and we haven't had that particular problem again yet. The other issue we have though is that the phone runs 4 minutes slow if it's set to automatically update it's time. I can manually set the time to the proper time, but if I set it back to auto update it immediately drops back 4 minutes. I have a Genius Bar appointment tonight for them to checkout the phone.

Anyway... It's a great product so far. We obviously have run into a few glitches, but nothing I would describe as a show stopper.

Please bear this in mind as honest curiosity and nothing more. You seem to be an ideal tester of the idea since you are having such frequent call drops. Do you have any kind of case or "bumper" on your phone? If not, any chance you can get one to see if it really does resolve the issue or if there is maybe more going on here than just the antenna problem. I suspect that this also has to due with the expected iOS 4.01 rumor about frequency switching since I seem to be getting more interference and call drops since upgrading my 3GS to iOS 4.

Really??? I may have to run out and lunch and see what the lines look like at ATT stores today that are selling the 4 to the general public for the first time today. I'm pretty sure that any "halting" sales will be due to the fact that they are sold out rather than concern over this antenna issue or Jobs pissing off customers.

It depends how you define 'slow down'. Would more people have purchased an iPhone 4 is this issue didn't rear its head. As I said, I personally know a few people who changed their mind on the iPhone 4 because of this, and I'm sure there's more networks of friends like this. The issue right now is word is only starting to spread, and from what I've been hearing, if you take AT&T for example; they are spreading misinformation. Saying the issue is purely visual with the bars etc. I think it'll hurt sales, what no one knows yet, is to what degree. That 1.7M doesn't take into account the amount of people who returned them. As I said time and time again, we'll see.

And no, Apple it not doomed, and I never said they were.

He's just talking crap. No one ever said sales were "halting".

This is something we won't know. As 1.7 million people did buy the phone in three days plus the 6 hours it was available pre sale, and the shortages were such that it's being said that Apple could have sold between 2 and 2.5 million in the same amount of time, it would be impossible to know this. As the waits are continuing, we may never know this.

While it's likely that a few people either won't buy the phone because of this, or will simply wait for a while, it's also likely that that some few might buy something else because they have to get their new phone NOW anyway, and the backlog it too much for them.

If this problem persists, and is shown to be more than a minor irritation, then it could be serious. But so far, we don't know how many are affected. But in a number of cases, the truth is that it is just a matter of only getting fewer bars. Pogue even had problems getting the problem at all, no matter what he did, and when he finally was able to duplicate it, he said that the calls were fine, but just the number of bars dropped. So we're seeing two different things. Depending on what, I don't know.

If we think on what happened with the Palm Pre when it came out, and all of the hardware problems it had, maybe we can get some idea here. But there were hundreds of people writing about their problems in the fisrt week, and Palm only sold 50,000 phones, so that was a big percentage, as things go these days. If there are thousands with this problem for the iPhone, that's still a far smaller percentage, considering that Apple has likely already sold a good 2 million phones. And as so many people get cases of some sort anyway, this really isn't such a big deal to even most of those with the problem.

Right now, I'm more interested in what the proximity sensor thing is all about, a calibration error?

I was going to buy but now I am not.

Yes melgross I'm also worried about the proximity sensor issue.

It seems when you're getting moderate or poor signal (3 bars or less) it doesn't just "slow" down the connection. It kills it. Completely. (perhaps when you're in a good signal it doesn't need the antenna to couple)

Then there are these spots and stuff. Geez. I bet a lot of people are feeling the Jobsian wrath now. But ultimately I personally blame Jobs. He is handling this like a complete assclown, by blaming customers and refusing to do anything, even give out cases. I'm very surprised and disappointed at this whole thing.

That's not true though. Most reports say that until the signal goes down to 1, the signal stays fine. Personally, I don't care about it. I have a skin anyway on my 3G, and I intend to get one for the 4, Problem gone.