I'd just like to clarify -- when I said it was a "lousy phone" I mean "a lousy device for making phone calls on", rather than "a lousy smartphone". Apart from the proximity sensor issues and these signal problems I'm ecstatic with my iPhone 4. Furthermore, the proximity sensor is (personally) probably more annoying than the signal problems and I have a hunch it will be fixed in a software update (I think it's a calibration problem).
Quote:
Originally Posted by
hill60 
How do you explain Anand Shimpi's findings on the Nexus, when you are quoted as saying no other phones exhibit this behaviour?
Anand shows a drop of 10.7dB when held in the bare hand and 7.7dB when held in a case. I don't think the difference is significant; it's very slight compared to the 12.6dB difference between the iPhone 4 figures. Note that dB is a log scale unit, so these numbers actually reflect a small and quite large difference.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
jragosta
Anand at least made an attempt to measure things in a semi-controlled environment. and to implement controls. Gaywood did neither.
Ouch. I did what I could with the tools that I had, and (in my defence) I was upfront that my testing was limited and what those limits were.
Quote:
Note also, that Anand's conclusions were that the iPhone 4, even with its minor glitches was a considerably better phone than the iPhone 3GS - or any other phone on the market. And that was after a wide range of comparisons, not just Gaywood's one uncontrolled experiment.
Oh, they've definitely done a much better test than I have -- I have updated my original post to reflect that, and posted again since with a link to Anand's site.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Robin Huber
Whether others were involved in checking their work or if they worked alone. And I am troubled by the fact that Mr. Gaywood made a post here, the tone of which was something other than what I would expect of a serious researcher--a little starstruck and defensive it seemed to me.
Heh, dunno about defensive, but definitely starstruck. This doesn't happen to me a lot. My blog has had 10,000 hits in the last 24 hours; compared to about 3,000 for the whole of 2010 so far.
I worked alone, and no-one checked my findings. This blog post wouldn't pass a peer review process in a million years. And yet, I believe it was more rigorous than anything I'd read on the web until Anand's post today -- which is not intended to suggest I'm clever, so much as, why did no-one else try and do the really very basic things I did? In any event, I was honest about what I did and how I built my conclusions. That's how tyou do science.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Prof. Peabody
Actually not. If you read closely, a large part of what the first expert said (and no offence to Richard Gaywood but he says in his own blog that he is actually *not* an antenna expert so the first expert is the one to really listen to)
No offence taken, you are correct to do so.
Quote:
So while the ultimate fix might be in the manufacturing, there is a fix for the firmware or software that might alleviate the problem a great deal. By changing the algorithm that determines the bars, they can hopefully fine tune it so that a large part of the problem goes away.
I don't think that's true. I would say that what Anand is saying is: part of this is a real problem, and part of it is a perceived problem that it worse than it is because the calibration of the bars is a little odd (with that very broad range of signal strengths mapped to five bars). Recalibration will make the problem look less odd, but it won't change the attenuation Anandtech measured one whit.
Now, as I say at the end of my piece, if the iPhone 4's "ungripped" reception is really good, the attenuation matters a lot less; basically, even when you're holding it, you still come out ahead. Anandtech have shown that to be partly the case. Based on that, they are saying this isn't a smaller issue than it might appear, and I am inclined to agree.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
John.B
Grow up.
I get that a lot.
Even from Microsoft. It stopped bothering me a long time ago though; about a week after I started school in fact
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