Everything you've said here just boils down to ... "It's a lie because Apple's iPhone 4 is more sensitive to these issues."
The fact is though, that Apple has admitted all along that the iPhone 4 is more sensitive to these issues, and they purposely designed the antenna that way. What you are leaving out also, is the part where *because* the iPhone 4's antenna is so sensitive, it drops less calls in marginal areas than other phones.
Yes, iPhone 4 has a very sensitive antenna. That's pretty much the whole point of the thing. All you have to do is hold it normally and you will get better reception and fewer dropped calls than any other phone. If you insist on clapping it to your head like a moron with your giant hand wrapped around it and if you are in a low signal area you might find some degradation of the signal (although it most likely won't drop a call).
I understand that some people have sweaty hands, and that some people are not as dexterous as others and have to hold the phone in that unusual way and so they *might* see a *slight* increase in dropped calls, but that's the essential trade-off of the iPhone 4 design. A better antenna, that's more sensitive, but with an obvious weak spot that you have to avoid.
If you don't like it, buy some other phone. It's not a flaw, it's a design choice made on purpose.
Sorry now you are making things up Can you support the claim of less dropped calls than any other phone? If you mean iPhone 3Gs to iPhone 4 then this is reasonable and is what Apple have said. However if you are referring to other OEMs then this claim is unfounded.
I think Apple did make that design choice rather than a flaw. However, I think they screwed up by Jobs telling people to hold it differently- a silly thing to say which gave the impression that it was the consumers fault!
Also bars mean nothing, they do not relate to you ability to make calls or data. The issue of dropping calls is a function of phone Rx sensitivity and operator network coverage. AT&T (from what I read and listen to as I am in the UK) has poor coverage in some areas, which only serves to compound the problem. For those outside the US I think this will never be seen as a problem.
I wouldn't care what they did, as long as it didn't result in every man and his dog suddenly thinking they were bloody electrical engineers.
Including you, apparently.
Quote:
They should have left it with that. This concentrated attempt to make their competitors look bad so they look better is contemptible. It makes them look weak. I don't like when people act like that and I don't like it when companies do either..
Oh, get over your self-righteous, hypocritical bullshit. Apple's response is entirely appropriate and correct. If the other phone manufacturers don't like it, maybe they shouldn't have been astroturfing this issue so hard.
Sure, other phone experience attenuation, but Apple has the unique problem of having the actual metal surface of the antenna exposed. iPhone4 more than attenuates, the signal actually gets shorted if you bridge the gap in antennas with any part of your hand. This is a minor problem. Apple can easily fix it by coating the metal bands with a thin, non-conductive coating.
So yes, all phones have some issues, but Apple's issue is different, and they are still being disingenuous.
Sure, other phone experience attenuation, but Apple has the unique problem of having the actual metal surface of the antenna exposed. iPhone4 more than attenuates, the signal actually gets shorted if you bridge the gap in antennas with any part of your hand. This is a minor problem. Apple can easily fix it by coating the metal bands with a thin, non-conductive coating.
So yes, all phones have some issues, but Apple's issue is different, and they are still being disingenuous.
In actual daily use by nearly every iPhone 4 owner, having the antenna exposed has made absolutely no difference. If the antenna actually "gets shorted" by bridging the gap, every iPhone 4 owner could instantly recreate the issue at any given time in any location regardless of signal strength. That is not at all the case.
In actual daily use by nearly every iPhone 4 owner, having the antenna exposed has made absolutely no difference. If the antenna actually "gets shorted" by bridging the gap, every iPhone 4 owner could instantly recreate the issue at any given time in any location regardless of signal strength. That is not at all the case.
It only happens to the fatties... and let's face it... do we really care if they can't dial up for pizza delivery or have to take a walk to the pay phone? It will probably do them some good!
In any case, it's a bit of a design flaw but (as magical as their devices may be!) Apple just have regular people working for them that are bound to make the occasional mistake. Like Steve said, they aren't perfect!
The bumper seems to bring the IP4 reception back into the race with the major players though so there's no reason most people shouldn't be focusing on the IP4's virtues rather than its flaws.
if you had only 2 cents and all of a sudden you saw another penny on the sidewalk and picked it up you would be 50% richer.
If the failure rate of your product increases by 50% over your previous model peformance you would never consider it insignificant. If my business had a failure rate jump that high I'd be all over my QA Department.
A suggestion from the Nokia user forums, take note of the date.
Quote:
Re: Nokia N97 Mini - Problems with antenna ?!
Options
07-Apr-2010 11:28 PM
Are you putting your hand over the bottom end of the phone? That's where the antenna is, so if you're in a moderate to weak signal area, you can easily drop the signal to zero with your hand. I find I can force my phone to drop down from 3G to GSM completely by putting it next to my head, sometimes.
All this grab-assing of competing phones is tiresome. Apple, please post a video showing the signal drop when the antenna gap on the iPhone 4 is just lightly touched with a pinky finger.
All this grab-assing of competing phones is tiresome. Apple, please post a video showing the signal drop when the antenna gap on the iPhone 4 is just lightly touched with a pinky finger.
gtf over it. if the issue is affecting your experience of the iPhone 4, return it and be done with it. if you don't own one, no-one really gives a damn.
In my humble opinion, Apple's demonstrations are totally disingenuous.
The simple test comes down to this:
1) Hold the iPhone 4 without the bumper case in a natural way with your left hand and watch the reception quality take a major nosedive in many cases.
2) Hold a Blackberry, HTC smartphone, or Motorola Droid series cellphone in a natural way with your left hand and note that the reception quality does not drop or drops significantly less than the iPhone 4.
Apple's own demonstrations use a hand grip on competitors' cellphones that are NOT what you normally do when you hold a cellphone in your left hand. In short, Apple does really have a hardware problem and they need to fix it permanently (like for example anodizing the metal antenna band or covering it with a clear plastic covering to reduce sensitivity to the electrical charge from the human body transmitted through the skin on your hand).
Antennas: Jobs Was Right. They're Still a Challenge
As phones continue to shrink, fitting antennas in and making them work correctly often comes down to trial and error
By Amy Thomson
Whatever you think of Steve Jobs' defense of the iPhone 4 and its reception issues, the Apple (AAPL) boss was right about one thing: Antennas are a technological challenge, one that engineers have wrestled with since before Gordon Gekko barked orders into his Motorola (MOT) DynaTAC from a beach in the Hamptons. And as phones continue to shrink, fitting antennas in and making them work correctly often comes down to trial and error, says Stephen Temple, a retired engineer who helped plan Europe's GSM technology. "It would be fair to say that antenna design is a little bit of a dark art," Temple says.
The $4,000 DynaTAC weighed in at almost two pounds and was eight inches long. Today's phones often weigh less than four ounces and can be shorter than the DynaTAC's 5-inch antenna even as they pack in features such as video cameras and QWERTY keyboards. Since the late 1990s, consumer tastes have turned against external antennas, which means they must be crammed inside the handset's casing. Phones now receive different signals such as 3G, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi, so they often have a half-dozen or more antennas. Reception can be affected by the amount of space around the antenna, the materials used elsewhere in the phone (plastic is less problematic than most metals), and whether the caller is right- or left-handed.
For most of today's basic voice and data cell signals, the right antenna length is about three inches or seven inches. FM radio and broadcast TV antennas are longer, though antennas can be bent to fit inside tiny phones. The optimal length is half the frequency the antenna is designed to receive divided by the speed of light. Any longer or shorter, and the reception can suffer. Furthermore, "the [human] body has a major effect on the antenna because at different frequencies it acts differently," says Stuart Lipoff, an electronics consultant.
The arrival of faster, fourth-generation networks will complicate design further. And as new categories of devices such as the iPad grow in popularity, it's getting harder to design antennas that are appropriate for all their potential uses. In years past, antenna engineers tested phones held against a person's head, says Jeff Shamblin, chief technology officer of Ethertronics, a San Diego antenna maker. Now, he says, "you have to test a cell phone sitting on a desk, in a user's lap, [or] being used on speakerphone while operated with two hands."
The bottom line: Antenna design has long been a problem for phonemakers, and complexity is growing as devices shrink.
gtf over it. if the issue is affecting your experience of the iPhone 4, return it and be done with it. if you don't own one, no-one really gives a damn.
Yeah, nobody gives a damn. That's why Apple keeps posting more ridiculous videos of the competition, doesn't post one of its own, and removed Field Test Mode from iOS 4.
1) Hold the iPhone 4 without the bumper case in a natural way with your left hand and watch the reception quality take a major nosedive in many cases.
Most people I know with iPhone 4's cannot get reception to "nosedive". The notion that it affects 90% of iPhone 4 users is a farce that must die. I would have thought Apple's data presented at the press conference would have achieved that, but obviously not.
Quote:
Originally Posted by SactoMan01
2) Hold a Blackberry, HTC smartphone, or Motorola Droid series cellphone in a natural way with your left hand and note that the reception quality does not drop or drops significantly less than the iPhone 4.
Unless you have data to support this, I presume you've come to this conclusion based on your false perception that most iPhone 4 owners' reception plummets when they hold their phones. Being wrong about your first point makes you wrong about this point as well.
Quote:
Originally Posted by SactoMan01
Apple's own demonstrations use a hand grip on competitors' cellphones that are NOT what you normally do when you hold a cellphone in your left hand. In short, Apple does really have a hardware problem and they need to fix it permanently (like for example anodizing the metal antenna band or covering it with a clear plastic covering to reduce sensitivity to the electrical charge from the human body transmitted through the skin on your hand).
They're holding the phones like the iPhone 4 is held in all of Apple's marketing materials, which is exactly how the user-created iPhone 4 demonstation videos showed. We know this to be true because when Steve Jobs told an owner to "hold it differently", people went apeshit because all of Apple's promotional materials showed the phone being held exactly how Steve was telling users not to. It's only fair that they demonstrate all of these phones being held in the same manner as the iPhone 4 was in 99% of the user-created iPhone 4 reception demonstrations.
Yeah, nobody gives a damn. That's why Apple keeps posting more ridiculous videos of the competition, doesn't post one of its own, and removed Field Test Mode from iOS 4.
yup. that's why handsets by the thousand are being returned - not.
A leader in Antenna design? Why? What they done that's leading? Or is it just that fact that nearly every company you see is a 'innovator', but yet from a lot of them innovation is just a tag line. Although Nokia can claim they made the design of the 'modern' phone, but I haven't seen anything else great from them.
How about a strudy and strong phone each and every time that works at making phone calls. The E71 had better build quality than the Iphone. I dropped it a 50 times without a case and it still shines and never breaks. I dont think i can say that about the iphone 4 without a case, so its right that apple give a free case.
P.S. I hold my N97 the way they held in the video, it doesnt do anything.
gtf over it. if the issue is affecting your experience of the iPhone 4, return it and be done with it. if you don't own one, no-one really gives a damn.
I dont even own an i phone. this comment is for apple showing nokia's have a similar problem.
I was just talking to someone on the phone with an iphone 4 and i have a n97. what a perfect situation, except the call got dropped and i have full bars and i am holding my n97 with no case.
At my last office my E71 rarely ever dropped calls where iphones dont even get service.
The iphone 4 sucks at the phone part.
New suggestion from Apple: All iphone users, wear gloves that match your iphone color when making phone calls. Maybe it'll become a fad.
Why is the N97 mini on its last bar when it is being ass-grabbed? Is that a fair assessment, it could be doing some power savings.
Answers to this and all your questions are coming after the next apple product...until then dumb people of the world continue to buy a faulty apple product.
Iphone 1, 2, 3, 3s all inflated their signals for cover up. Now its the antenna, thatll be covered up by a free case.
Comments
Everything you've said here just boils down to ... "It's a lie because Apple's iPhone 4 is more sensitive to these issues."
The fact is though, that Apple has admitted all along that the iPhone 4 is more sensitive to these issues, and they purposely designed the antenna that way. What you are leaving out also, is the part where *because* the iPhone 4's antenna is so sensitive, it drops less calls in marginal areas than other phones.
Yes, iPhone 4 has a very sensitive antenna. That's pretty much the whole point of the thing. All you have to do is hold it normally and you will get better reception and fewer dropped calls than any other phone. If you insist on clapping it to your head like a moron with your giant hand wrapped around it and if you are in a low signal area you might find some degradation of the signal (although it most likely won't drop a call).
I understand that some people have sweaty hands, and that some people are not as dexterous as others and have to hold the phone in that unusual way and so they *might* see a *slight* increase in dropped calls, but that's the essential trade-off of the iPhone 4 design. A better antenna, that's more sensitive, but with an obvious weak spot that you have to avoid.
If you don't like it, buy some other phone. It's not a flaw, it's a design choice made on purpose.
Sorry now you are making things up
I think Apple did make that design choice rather than a flaw. However, I think they screwed up by Jobs telling people to hold it differently- a silly thing to say which gave the impression that it was the consumers fault!
Also bars mean nothing, they do not relate to you ability to make calls or data. The issue of dropping calls is a function of phone Rx sensitivity and operator network coverage. AT&T (from what I read and listen to as I am in the UK) has poor coverage in some areas, which only serves to compound the problem. For those outside the US I think this will never be seen as a problem.
Kevin
I wouldn't care what they did, as long as it didn't result in every man and his dog suddenly thinking they were bloody electrical engineers.
Including you, apparently.
They should have left it with that. This concentrated attempt to make their competitors look bad so they look better is contemptible. It makes them look weak. I don't like when people act like that and I don't like it when companies do either..
Oh, get over your self-righteous, hypocritical bullshit. Apple's response is entirely appropriate and correct. If the other phone manufacturers don't like it, maybe they shouldn't have been astroturfing this issue so hard.
So yes, all phones have some issues, but Apple's issue is different, and they are still being disingenuous.
Sure, other phone experience attenuation, but Apple has the unique problem of having the actual metal surface of the antenna exposed. iPhone4 more than attenuates, the signal actually gets shorted if you bridge the gap in antennas with any part of your hand. This is a minor problem. Apple can easily fix it by coating the metal bands with a thin, non-conductive coating.
So yes, all phones have some issues, but Apple's issue is different, and they are still being disingenuous.
In actual daily use by nearly every iPhone 4 owner, having the antenna exposed has made absolutely no difference. If the antenna actually "gets shorted" by bridging the gap, every iPhone 4 owner could instantly recreate the issue at any given time in any location regardless of signal strength. That is not at all the case.
If a phone goes from dropping 2 calls per hundred to dropping 2.75-3 calls per hundred that's an increase of almost 50%. How's that insignificant?
if you had only 2 cents and all of a sudden you saw another penny on the sidewalk and picked it up you would be 50% richer.
In actual daily use by nearly every iPhone 4 owner, having the antenna exposed has made absolutely no difference. If the antenna actually "gets shorted" by bridging the gap, every iPhone 4 owner could instantly recreate the issue at any given time in any location regardless of signal strength. That is not at all the case.
It only happens to the fatties... and let's face it... do we really care if they can't dial up for pizza delivery or have to take a walk to the pay phone? It will probably do them some good!
In any case, it's a bit of a design flaw but (as magical as their devices may be!) Apple just have regular people working for them that are bound to make the occasional mistake. Like Steve said, they aren't perfect!
The bumper seems to bring the IP4 reception back into the race with the major players though so there's no reason most people shouldn't be focusing on the IP4's virtues rather than its flaws.
if you had only 2 cents and all of a sudden you saw another penny on the sidewalk and picked it up you would be 50% richer.
If the failure rate of your product increases by 50% over your previous model peformance you would never consider it insignificant. If my business had a failure rate jump that high I'd be all over my QA Department.
But yes, it's the same as a penny.....
When next year's iPhone comes out.
Re: Nokia N97 Mini - Problems with antenna ?!
Options
07-Apr-2010 11:28 PM
Are you putting your hand over the bottom end of the phone? That's where the antenna is, so if you're in a moderate to weak signal area, you can easily drop the signal to zero with your hand. I find I can force my phone to drop down from 3G to GSM completely by putting it next to my head, sometimes.
Source
This should bring an end to this nonsense, well regarding the N97 Mini anyway.
All this grab-assing of competing phones is tiresome. Apple, please post a video showing the signal drop when the antenna gap on the iPhone 4 is just lightly touched with a pinky finger.
gtf over it. if the issue is affecting your experience of the iPhone 4, return it and be done with it. if you don't own one, no-one really gives a damn.
The simple test comes down to this:
1) Hold the iPhone 4 without the bumper case in a natural way with your left hand and watch the reception quality take a major nosedive in many cases.
2) Hold a Blackberry, HTC smartphone, or Motorola Droid series cellphone in a natural way with your left hand and note that the reception quality does not drop or drops significantly less than the iPhone 4.
Apple's own demonstrations use a hand grip on competitors' cellphones that are NOT what you normally do when you hold a cellphone in your left hand. In short, Apple does really have a hardware problem and they need to fix it permanently (like for example anodizing the metal antenna band or covering it with a clear plastic covering to reduce sensitivity to the electrical charge from the human body transmitted through the skin on your hand).
Antennas: Jobs Was Right. They're Still a Challenge
As phones continue to shrink, fitting antennas in and making them work correctly often comes down to trial and error
By Amy Thomson
Whatever you think of Steve Jobs' defense of the iPhone 4 and its reception issues, the Apple (AAPL) boss was right about one thing: Antennas are a technological challenge, one that engineers have wrestled with since before Gordon Gekko barked orders into his Motorola (MOT) DynaTAC from a beach in the Hamptons. And as phones continue to shrink, fitting antennas in and making them work correctly often comes down to trial and error, says Stephen Temple, a retired engineer who helped plan Europe's GSM technology. "It would be fair to say that antenna design is a little bit of a dark art," Temple says.
The $4,000 DynaTAC weighed in at almost two pounds and was eight inches long. Today's phones often weigh less than four ounces and can be shorter than the DynaTAC's 5-inch antenna even as they pack in features such as video cameras and QWERTY keyboards. Since the late 1990s, consumer tastes have turned against external antennas, which means they must be crammed inside the handset's casing. Phones now receive different signals such as 3G, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi, so they often have a half-dozen or more antennas. Reception can be affected by the amount of space around the antenna, the materials used elsewhere in the phone (plastic is less problematic than most metals), and whether the caller is right- or left-handed.
For most of today's basic voice and data cell signals, the right antenna length is about three inches or seven inches. FM radio and broadcast TV antennas are longer, though antennas can be bent to fit inside tiny phones. The optimal length is half the frequency the antenna is designed to receive divided by the speed of light. Any longer or shorter, and the reception can suffer. Furthermore, "the [human] body has a major effect on the antenna because at different frequencies it acts differently," says Stuart Lipoff, an electronics consultant.
The arrival of faster, fourth-generation networks will complicate design further. And as new categories of devices such as the iPad grow in popularity, it's getting harder to design antennas that are appropriate for all their potential uses. In years past, antenna engineers tested phones held against a person's head, says Jeff Shamblin, chief technology officer of Ethertronics, a San Diego antenna maker. Now, he says, "you have to test a cell phone sitting on a desk, in a user's lap, [or] being used on speakerphone while operated with two hands."
The bottom line: Antenna design has long been a problem for phonemakers, and complexity is growing as devices shrink.
With Connie Guglielmo
gtf over it. if the issue is affecting your experience of the iPhone 4, return it and be done with it. if you don't own one, no-one really gives a damn.
Yeah, nobody gives a damn. That's why Apple keeps posting more ridiculous videos of the competition, doesn't post one of its own, and removed Field Test Mode from iOS 4.
1) Hold the iPhone 4 without the bumper case in a natural way with your left hand and watch the reception quality take a major nosedive in many cases.
Most people I know with iPhone 4's cannot get reception to "nosedive". The notion that it affects 90% of iPhone 4 users is a farce that must die. I would have thought Apple's data presented at the press conference would have achieved that, but obviously not.
2) Hold a Blackberry, HTC smartphone, or Motorola Droid series cellphone in a natural way with your left hand and note that the reception quality does not drop or drops significantly less than the iPhone 4.
Unless you have data to support this, I presume you've come to this conclusion based on your false perception that most iPhone 4 owners' reception plummets when they hold their phones. Being wrong about your first point makes you wrong about this point as well.
Apple's own demonstrations use a hand grip on competitors' cellphones that are NOT what you normally do when you hold a cellphone in your left hand. In short, Apple does really have a hardware problem and they need to fix it permanently (like for example anodizing the metal antenna band or covering it with a clear plastic covering to reduce sensitivity to the electrical charge from the human body transmitted through the skin on your hand).
They're holding the phones like the iPhone 4 is held in all of Apple's marketing materials, which is exactly how the user-created iPhone 4 demonstation videos showed. We know this to be true because when Steve Jobs told an owner to "hold it differently", people went apeshit because all of Apple's promotional materials showed the phone being held exactly how Steve was telling users not to. It's only fair that they demonstrate all of these phones being held in the same manner as the iPhone 4 was in 99% of the user-created iPhone 4 reception demonstrations.
Yeah, nobody gives a damn. That's why Apple keeps posting more ridiculous videos of the competition, doesn't post one of its own, and removed Field Test Mode from iOS 4.
yup. that's why handsets by the thousand are being returned - not.
A leader in Antenna design? Why? What they done that's leading? Or is it just that fact that nearly every company you see is a 'innovator', but yet from a lot of them innovation is just a tag line. Although Nokia can claim they made the design of the 'modern' phone, but I haven't seen anything else great from them.
How about a strudy and strong phone each and every time that works at making phone calls. The E71 had better build quality than the Iphone. I dropped it a 50 times without a case and it still shines and never breaks. I dont think i can say that about the iphone 4 without a case, so its right that apple give a free case.
P.S. I hold my N97 the way they held in the video, it doesnt do anything.
gtf over it. if the issue is affecting your experience of the iPhone 4, return it and be done with it. if you don't own one, no-one really gives a damn.
I dont even own an i phone. this comment is for apple showing nokia's have a similar problem.
You gtf over it and return your i phone.
At my last office my E71 rarely ever dropped calls where iphones dont even get service.
The iphone 4 sucks at the phone part.
New suggestion from Apple: All iphone users, wear gloves that match your iphone color when making phone calls. Maybe it'll become a fad.
Answers to this and all your questions are coming after the next apple product...until then dumb people of the world continue to buy a faulty apple product.
Iphone 1, 2, 3, 3s all inflated their signals for cover up. Now its the antenna, thatll be covered up by a free case.