How many times on these forums have we all made fun of M$ releasing under-tested/buggy products and letting their customers do the beta testing for them then fixing it after the fact... is it coincidence or irony that Apple appears to be doing the same? (or at least we are giving them the benefit that they can)
The problem with MS is that they spend years beta testing their products and when they release them they spend years patching their bugs. Also, MS only admit that they screw up when they are about to release a newer version.
I am telling the truth, and I am currently holding my iPhone in that very same location, my lounge room.
It used to drop to GPRS depending where i was in my room. I now currently cannot lose 5 bars of 3G (i am in australia, so I don't have edge access) and I was shocked.
I had a trip around the city on the sunday, (my friend installed it on my phone after his) and wow... in places where it dropped to gprs continuously, it wouldn't go below 3 bars 3G.
The connection is unbelievably strong with this beta.
judging by "number of bars" is a bad way to determine signal strength. that's just a software solution that determines a threshold of db's of signals and transforms then into a "bar"
for all we know we could be receiving the same strength, but Apple the threshold to make it appear that better signal strength is being achieved.
Uh, between you and I, do you actually believe it doesn't make a difference?
You think having 12 teams working on 12 phones isn't much different from having 1 team working on 1 phone?
It's not really like that though. Nokia for instance shares the same phone inards across different models packaged in a slightly different way. I'd be surprised if they've more than 3 different hardware platforms in the 72+ million smartphones they shipped last year.
Apple also haven't just one model - they've still got the original iPhone to support and the iPod Touch.
Uh, between you and I, do you actually believe it doesn't make a difference?
You think having 12 teams working on 12 phones isn't much different from having 1 team working on 1 phone?
Exactly. My point is: how does the "author" of this story know what Nokia, RIM, and the others do. More speculation based on a guess, wrapped in conjecture.
It's rather peripheral, but I'm curious to know who sponsored the mindWireless study and what is the margin of error on each reported frequency of dropped calls?
It's not "way out of proportion" if you're one of the ones who's experiencing problems. I've experienced the dropped calls myself, in an area AT&T maps show as fully 3G-saturated. And it wasn't just one drop, it was four during a single 20-minute conversation. And I wasn't walking into an elevator, I was sitting in my living room. So this problem very much is real, no matter how much you don't want to believe it is.
This is the same for me. I am sitting in the living room in rockland county New York and the phone drops from 3 bars to 0 even if I don't move. And anywhere in New York City, Manhatten, Bronx, Brooklyn... dropped call after dropped call it sucks so much. The most annoying thing of all is when I have 1 bar of 3g it will drop my call and switch to 1 bar of edge which also drops my call.... UGH!!!
I guess Apple want to get 2.1 out ASAP, and if the push-notification-system isn't ready then it's been removed to allow 2.1 to be released in the next week or two. 2.1.1 or 2.2 will come in a month with the push feature once it is ready.
Or it just got removed to allow a new beta to be released whilst the push software was going through a broken build. However I'd rather that Apple waited and got it correct from the start for this necessary feature.
I wish that Apple would not leave final release candidate testing to end users at the point of sale. I know it is hard to catch all errors however, and that some issues will always arise afterwards, but Apple has been having just a few too many recently to be comfortable. Still, once the issues are worked out, the stuff's good.
I haven't had any dropped calls, though my calls tend to be short and there probably isn't much to the 3G network in my area.
I am having significant problems with the Mail application. It seems to get into a state where for POP mail, it will no longer attempt to get mail (even if I manually request it, I assume that's what the circular arrow at the lower left is for) unless I fully power off the iPhone and restart.
Mail I can see on my phone even after trying manually update it or setting the push to every 15 minutes is still not showing me everything I really have. I use gmail. I will push update and 2 new messages come. I go to gmail.com and log in and I see two more unread messages sent prior to the ones I have received on my phone. Why Can't I get these messages on my phone!? Also You Tube likes to tell me that "This video is not formatted properly to be viewed here" even thought I just watched the video a day ago or a few hours before. What is that about? Also right now I downloaded updates for my Applications on my computer and then I plugged my phone in to sync. I started at 9:56and the stupid back up took until 11:53 and now its still syncing. It has been syncing from 11:54 till now still and its only 60% done. WTF!!!
This is the same for me. I am sitting in the living room in rockland county New York and the phone drops from 3 bars to 0 even if I don't move. And anywhere in New York City, Manhatten, Bronx, Brooklyn... dropped call after dropped call it sucks so much. The most annoying thing of all is when I have 1 bar of 3g it will drop my call and switch to 1 bar of edge which also drops my call.... UGH!!!
Funny. I live in Jersey City and traveled to Rockland last Sat.. I used the 3g GPS to track our route. Never lost a signal and found us in seconds when recalculating our position. I was worried that the iPhone wasn't going to work, but it did without a hitch.
I see parrallels with the iPhone 3G and the first HD TV's.
I can remember the shops being inundated with chants of "i want my money back" when discovering their shiny new HD TV's wouldn't play Blue Ray movies and that their HD Ready TV's weren't really proper HD TV's after all.
I have an iPhone 3G and live in a UK town which is supposedly a HOT SPOT haven for 3G coverage. And it is if you believe the providers map which paints its streets and roads in a deep shade of Blue, meaning you'll experience the very best in 3G coverage.
I've never had a dropped call or a problem with a text. Even emails are swiftly delivered with the sound of the iPhones 'whoosh' ringing in my ears. No the problems start to happen when i try do what the iPhone supposedly does best like loading up Google map, or use GPS tracking even reading image rich websites. That's when the iPhone 3G becomes a brick.
I have called O2 who now tell me i need HSDPA to get the best out of the iPhone. HSDPA??? never heard of it until now and so a quick WikiPedia search reveals it stands for High-Speed Downlink Packet Access which allows Universal Mobile Telecommunications System to have higher data transfer speeds and capacity.
And no 02 don't have HSDPA network coverage in my area and so the town's map is now painted a washed out purple meaning nothing to report as of yet.
So i'm not feeling duped, just a little embarrased with myself for not researching this a little more before buying what i now consider to be the Smartphone with the most potential.
So while my iPhone 3G's future still looks bright, the same can't be said for those poor buggers who first sat down to watch 1080p movies on their 720P TV's.
Letting you guys know... the dropped calls have been fixed in the latest beta 2.1. A friend of mine showed me as he updated his iPhone and in the same location the bars went from 1 bar of 3G to 5 bars of 3G. He says he was shocked how in areas it would struggle to find 3G before, now its consistently strong.
Regarding "fixed in the next (baseband modem) firmware update", if developers
know about this, and generally good sources like P. Burrows of Business Week
and the Wall St. Journal were tipped to this, shouldn't Apple at least whisper
to the Genius Bar techs that they should mumble about the fix, rather than needlessly
swapping out "bad units" for new ones? I'm amazed at the number of posters
to the Apple discussion fora (generally from big cities with a patchwork
of 3G and EDGE and network congestion) who rant about being on their
second or third replacement iPhone, and complain about it acting the
same. Perhaps those are all Nokia reps fanning the flames...
"* A typical business hears from only 4 percent of its dissatisfied customers; the other 96 percent just go quietly away, and 91 percent of them will never come back."
I've read that figure now on several sites. Where did AI get 10% ? Also, how many called their carrier instead of writing on a msg board? How many called Apple? How many simply returned it? How many read msg board but don't write? The only people trying to play this down are share holders. It's not in the best interest of any consumer to marginalize those with a problem.
I see parrallels with the iPhone 3G and the first HD TV's.
I can remember the shops being inundated with chants of "i want my money back" when discovering their shiny new HD TV's wouldn't play Blue Ray movies and that their HD Ready TV's weren't really proper HD TV's after all.
I have an iPhone 3G and live in a UK town which is supposedly a HOT SPOT haven for 3G coverage. And it is if you believe the providers map which paints its streets and roads in a deep shade of Blue, meaning you'll experience the very best in 3G coverage.
I've never had a dropped call or a problem with a text. Even emails are swiftly delivered with the sound of the iPhones 'whoosh' ringing in my ears. No the problems start to happen when i try do what the iPhone supposedly does best like loading up Google map, or use GPS tracking even reading image rich websites. That's when the iPhone 3G becomes a brick.
I have called O2 who now tell me i need HSDPA to get the best out of the iPhone. HSDPA??? never heard of it until now and so a quick WikiPedia search reveals it stands for High-Speed Downlink Packet Access which allows Universal Mobile Telecommunications System to have higher data transfer speeds and capacity.
And no 02 don't have HSDPA network coverage in my area and so the town's map is now painted a washed out purple meaning nothing to report as of yet.
So i'm not feeling duped, just a little embarrased with myself for not researching this a little more before buying what i now consider to be the Smartphone with the most potential.
So while my iPhone 3G's future still looks bright, the same can't be said for those poor buggers who first sat down to watch 1080p movies on their 720P TV's.
Or, for the enjoyment of all the conspiracy theorists... "It's a mystery wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma!"
i also have some concerns regarding mindWireless's dropped call "analysis."
i spent 8 years for a national wireless provider mentioned in the "study" and was very close to the business case around the marketing of credits to customers for dropped calls.
i have a hard time digesting those numbers as even ball park for ANY of the providers...even %s half those size would be large enough to spike churn at levels that would be debilitating from a cash flow standpoint.
most carriers are managing their networks to < 2% blocks and <2% drops. at the time we were running use cases on the subscriber base, we were seeing consistent averages of 1.6% to 1.8% (depending on the geography).
i doubt seriously the veracity of the quoted third party analysis and am concerned that it's not even directionally useful or descriptive of network performance on a relative basis.
80MM calls is NOTHING from an interconnect standpoint...especially in 2/07 that doesn't even represent a day's worth of traffic on one of the top 3 carriers. as a result, there's definitely a risk to under-sizing the sample from a statistical standpoint.
The dropped calls are not accidental. Apple has developed advanced heuristic, AI algorithms that determine when your calls have become tiresome, boring, tedious, redundant, repetitive, redundant and repetitive, and puts these calls out of their misery.
It's not a bug -- it's a feature!
Quote:
Originally Posted by zenwaves
I was in Manhattan yesterday, and the drops in data accessibility were quite annoying.
I hope for everyone's sake that this is an issue which can be fixed by a software/firmware patch.
NYC seems to be the most prolific area with dropped calls and wonky 3G reception for the iPhone 3G.
providers would be challenged to know whether phones on their networks ended a call on purpose or not
I coulda sworn that my AT&T statements occasionally contain credits for dropped calls, so I thought they had someway of recognizing it, although it wasn't accurate enough. But now I can't find anything in my statements, so maybe I am crazy.
I have called O2 who now tell me i need HSDPA to get the best out of the iPhone. HSDPA??? never heard of it until now and so a quick WikiPedia search reveals it stands for High-Speed Downlink Packet Access which allows Universal Mobile Telecommunications System to have higher data transfer speeds and capacity.
At least they used that terminology instead of the loose 3G terminology. The image below is a bit outdated with some terms and speeds on the future high end, but it will help you understand the differences in 3G.
Comments
How many times on these forums have we all made fun of M$ releasing under-tested/buggy products and letting their customers do the beta testing for them then fixing it after the fact... is it coincidence or irony that Apple appears to be doing the same? (or at least we are giving them the benefit that they can)
The problem with MS is that they spend years beta testing their products and when they release them they spend years patching their bugs. Also, MS only admit that they screw up when they are about to release a newer version.
Well duh!!! Apple only sells one phone. Such rocket science. How many resources would you say RIM, Nokia, et al dedicate to each respective model?
Uh, between you and I, do you actually believe it doesn't make a difference?
You think having 12 teams working on 12 phones isn't much different from having 1 team working on 1 phone?
I am telling the truth, and I am currently holding my iPhone in that very same location, my lounge room.
It used to drop to GPRS depending where i was in my room. I now currently cannot lose 5 bars of 3G (i am in australia, so I don't have edge access) and I was shocked.
I had a trip around the city on the sunday, (my friend installed it on my phone after his) and wow... in places where it dropped to gprs continuously, it wouldn't go below 3 bars 3G.
The connection is unbelievably strong with this beta.
judging by "number of bars" is a bad way to determine signal strength. that's just a software solution that determines a threshold of db's of signals and transforms then into a "bar"
for all we know we could be receiving the same strength, but Apple the threshold to make it appear that better signal strength is being achieved.
Uh, between you and I, do you actually believe it doesn't make a difference?
You think having 12 teams working on 12 phones isn't much different from having 1 team working on 1 phone?
It's not really like that though. Nokia for instance shares the same phone inards across different models packaged in a slightly different way. I'd be surprised if they've more than 3 different hardware platforms in the 72+ million smartphones they shipped last year.
Apple also haven't just one model - they've still got the original iPhone to support and the iPod Touch.
Uh, between you and I, do you actually believe it doesn't make a difference?
You think having 12 teams working on 12 phones isn't much different from having 1 team working on 1 phone?
Exactly. My point is: how does the "author" of this story know what Nokia, RIM, and the others do. More speculation based on a guess, wrapped in conjecture.
Uh, between you and I, do you actually believe it doesn't make a difference?
You think having 12 teams working on 12 phones isn't much different from having 1 team working on 1 phone?
That leaves out just about everything. How big are the teams? How much experience does each team have in making a handheld device?
It's not "way out of proportion" if you're one of the ones who's experiencing problems. I've experienced the dropped calls myself, in an area AT&T maps show as fully 3G-saturated. And it wasn't just one drop, it was four during a single 20-minute conversation. And I wasn't walking into an elevator, I was sitting in my living room. So this problem very much is real, no matter how much you don't want to believe it is.
This is the same for me. I am sitting in the living room in rockland county New York and the phone drops from 3 bars to 0 even if I don't move. And anywhere in New York City, Manhatten, Bronx, Brooklyn... dropped call after dropped call it sucks so much. The most annoying thing of all is when I have 1 bar of 3g it will drop my call and switch to 1 bar of edge which also drops my call.... UGH!!!
Or it just got removed to allow a new beta to be released whilst the push software was going through a broken build. However I'd rather that Apple waited and got it correct from the start for this necessary feature.
I wish that Apple would not leave final release candidate testing to end users at the point of sale. I know it is hard to catch all errors however, and that some issues will always arise afterwards, but Apple has been having just a few too many recently to be comfortable. Still, once the issues are worked out, the stuff's good.
I haven't had any dropped calls, though my calls tend to be short and there probably isn't much to the 3G network in my area.
I am having significant problems with the Mail application. It seems to get into a state where for POP mail, it will no longer attempt to get mail (even if I manually request it, I assume that's what the circular arrow at the lower left is for) unless I fully power off the iPhone and restart.
Mail I can see on my phone even after trying manually update it or setting the push to every 15 minutes is still not showing me everything I really have. I use gmail. I will push update and 2 new messages come. I go to gmail.com and log in and I see two more unread messages sent prior to the ones I have received on my phone. Why Can't I get these messages on my phone!? Also You Tube likes to tell me that "This video is not formatted properly to be viewed here" even thought I just watched the video a day ago or a few hours before. What is that about? Also right now I downloaded updates for my Applications on my computer and then I plugged my phone in to sync. I started at 9:56and the stupid back up took until 11:53 and now its still syncing. It has been syncing from 11:54 till now still and its only 60% done. WTF!!!
This is the same for me. I am sitting in the living room in rockland county New York and the phone drops from 3 bars to 0 even if I don't move. And anywhere in New York City, Manhatten, Bronx, Brooklyn... dropped call after dropped call it sucks so much. The most annoying thing of all is when I have 1 bar of 3g it will drop my call and switch to 1 bar of edge which also drops my call.... UGH!!!
Funny. I live in Jersey City and traveled to Rockland last Sat.. I used the 3g GPS to track our route. Never lost a signal and found us in seconds when recalculating our position. I was worried that the iPhone wasn't going to work, but it did without a hitch.
I can remember the shops being inundated with chants of "i want my money back" when discovering their shiny new HD TV's wouldn't play Blue Ray movies and that their HD Ready TV's weren't really proper HD TV's after all.
I have an iPhone 3G and live in a UK town which is supposedly a HOT SPOT haven for 3G coverage. And it is if you believe the providers map which paints its streets and roads in a deep shade of Blue, meaning you'll experience the very best in 3G coverage.
I've never had a dropped call or a problem with a text. Even emails are swiftly delivered with the sound of the iPhones 'whoosh' ringing in my ears. No the problems start to happen when i try do what the iPhone supposedly does best like loading up Google map, or use GPS tracking even reading image rich websites. That's when the iPhone 3G becomes a brick.
I have called O2 who now tell me i need HSDPA to get the best out of the iPhone. HSDPA??? never heard of it until now and so a quick WikiPedia search reveals it stands for High-Speed Downlink Packet Access which allows Universal Mobile Telecommunications System to have higher data transfer speeds and capacity.
And no 02 don't have HSDPA network coverage in my area and so the town's map is now painted a washed out purple meaning nothing to report as of yet.
So i'm not feeling duped, just a little embarrased with myself for not researching this a little more before buying what i now consider to be the Smartphone with the most potential.
So while my iPhone 3G's future still looks bright, the same can't be said for those poor buggers who first sat down to watch 1080p movies on their 720P TV's.
Letting you guys know... the dropped calls have been fixed in the latest beta 2.1. A friend of mine showed me as he updated his iPhone and in the same location the bars went from 1 bar of 3G to 5 bars of 3G. He says he was shocked how in areas it would struggle to find 3G before, now its consistently strong.
Regarding "fixed in the next (baseband modem) firmware update", if developers
know about this, and generally good sources like P. Burrows of Business Week
and the Wall St. Journal were tipped to this, shouldn't Apple at least whisper
to the Genius Bar techs that they should mumble about the fix, rather than needlessly
swapping out "bad units" for new ones? I'm amazed at the number of posters
to the Apple discussion fora (generally from big cities with a patchwork
of 3G and EDGE and network congestion) who rant about being on their
second or third replacement iPhone, and complain about it acting the
same. Perhaps those are all Nokia reps fanning the flames...
"* A typical business hears from only 4 percent of its dissatisfied customers; the other 96 percent just go quietly away, and 91 percent of them will never come back."
I've read that figure now on several sites. Where did AI get 10% ? Also, how many called their carrier instead of writing on a msg board? How many called Apple? How many simply returned it? How many read msg board but don't write? The only people trying to play this down are share holders. It's not in the best interest of any consumer to marginalize those with a problem.
I see parrallels with the iPhone 3G and the first HD TV's.
I can remember the shops being inundated with chants of "i want my money back" when discovering their shiny new HD TV's wouldn't play Blue Ray movies and that their HD Ready TV's weren't really proper HD TV's after all.
I have an iPhone 3G and live in a UK town which is supposedly a HOT SPOT haven for 3G coverage. And it is if you believe the providers map which paints its streets and roads in a deep shade of Blue, meaning you'll experience the very best in 3G coverage.
I've never had a dropped call or a problem with a text. Even emails are swiftly delivered with the sound of the iPhones 'whoosh' ringing in my ears. No the problems start to happen when i try do what the iPhone supposedly does best like loading up Google map, or use GPS tracking even reading image rich websites. That's when the iPhone 3G becomes a brick.
I have called O2 who now tell me i need HSDPA to get the best out of the iPhone. HSDPA??? never heard of it until now and so a quick WikiPedia search reveals it stands for High-Speed Downlink Packet Access which allows Universal Mobile Telecommunications System to have higher data transfer speeds and capacity.
And no 02 don't have HSDPA network coverage in my area and so the town's map is now painted a washed out purple meaning nothing to report as of yet.
So i'm not feeling duped, just a little embarrased with myself for not researching this a little more before buying what i now consider to be the Smartphone with the most potential.
So while my iPhone 3G's future still looks bright, the same can't be said for those poor buggers who first sat down to watch 1080p movies on their 720P TV's.
Or, for the enjoyment of all the conspiracy theorists... "It's a mystery wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma!"
i spent 8 years for a national wireless provider mentioned in the "study" and was very close to the business case around the marketing of credits to customers for dropped calls.
i have a hard time digesting those numbers as even ball park for ANY of the providers...even %s half those size would be large enough to spike churn at levels that would be debilitating from a cash flow standpoint.
most carriers are managing their networks to < 2% blocks and <2% drops. at the time we were running use cases on the subscriber base, we were seeing consistent averages of 1.6% to 1.8% (depending on the geography).
i doubt seriously the veracity of the quoted third party analysis and am concerned that it's not even directionally useful or descriptive of network performance on a relative basis.
80MM calls is NOTHING from an interconnect standpoint...especially in 2/07 that doesn't even represent a day's worth of traffic on one of the top 3 carriers. as a result, there's definitely a risk to under-sizing the sample from a statistical standpoint.
The dropped calls are not accidental. Apple has developed advanced heuristic, AI algorithms that determine when your calls have become tiresome, boring, tedious, redundant, repetitive, redundant and repetitive, and puts these calls out of their misery.
It's not a bug -- it's a feature!
I was in Manhattan yesterday, and the drops in data accessibility were quite annoying.
I hope for everyone's sake that this is an issue which can be fixed by a software/firmware patch.
NYC seems to be the most prolific area with dropped calls and wonky 3G reception for the iPhone 3G.
providers would be challenged to know whether phones on their networks ended a call on purpose or not
I coulda sworn that my AT&T statements occasionally contain credits for dropped calls, so I thought they had someway of recognizing it, although it wasn't accurate enough. But now I can't find anything in my statements, so maybe I am crazy.
I have called O2 who now tell me i need HSDPA to get the best out of the iPhone. HSDPA??? never heard of it until now and so a quick WikiPedia search reveals it stands for High-Speed Downlink Packet Access which allows Universal Mobile Telecommunications System to have higher data transfer speeds and capacity.
At least they used that terminology instead of the loose 3G terminology. The image below is a bit outdated with some terms and speeds on the future high end, but it will help you understand the differences in 3G.
Or, for the enjoyment of all the conspiracy theorists... "It's a mystery wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma!"
pissed myself laughing