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What's the Problem With iPhone 3G Reception?
CWmike writes "Apple's iPhone 3G was just a couple of days old when reports began trickling onto the company's support forum from dissatisfied customers complaining about poor reception. Although no one outside of Apple and AT&T — and maybe a chipmaker or two — really knows, that has not kept others from speculating, or in a few cases, making claims based on unnamed sources. What's going on? We may not have all the answers, but we do have questions. Gregg Keizer put together everything we know in a FAQ on the griping about iPhone 3G reception."
And there is an article (auto-translated article in link) in the Swedish magazine Ny Teknik (New Tehcnology) about this too.
So it's a problem that is well discussed these days.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
I live in a relatively rural area, but close enough to a large city that I can get 3G service at home. I was (and returned to) using a Samsung BlackjackII. I was able to use it without any issues at all and got 3G and EDGE service at and near my home. When I brought the new iphone home, I was unable to get anything other than a standard connection (no EDGE and no 3G) and sometimes I couldn't even get a reliable enough signal to make simple phone calls. After a few days of frustration, I returned it to the store and went back to the BlackjackII.
Just another datapoint.
From what I have read, this is a global problem. So no, it has nothing to do with AT&T (or any other phone company) and everything to do with the iPhone.
Infineon chips. (ex-Siemens)
I had the displeasure of working with products from this company, it is as fun as having a fork stuck in your eye.
Crappy documentation, flaky concepts, incompatible versions, etc.
how long until
I'm an idiot, I admit it: I've had BOTH versions of the iPhone. They're the same, folks, no better, no worse. If you're tinfoil hat's a little too snug (or you're holding it with either left or right hand) it tends to drop calls.
Really: the emperor's latest fashion is made of the same material. The instrument is no better as a phone, no faster as a PDA, no cleaner as a browser. It is still a very poorly designed phone, a not-TOO-bad PDA (esp. for Mac users) and a darned superior portable internet device.
Cellphone-to-cellphone reliability and call quality are illusions, get used to it. It's not how well the bear dances, it's that the bear dances AT ALL. Next, we'll rant about the fallacy of packet-switched vs. circuit-switched, at least as regards telephony.
The iPhone only has a b/g chipset. Performance of a MBP against a 802.11n access point isn't really indicative of how the b/g network would perform. You could be having considerable interference you'd never notice with the laptop.
Burst mode on the Linksys isn't part of the 802.11n draft but rather a proprietary Linksys extension - so really it's no wonder it isn't working well with non-Linksys clients.
as an iphone owner, I can say, yes it is OK to NOT love the phone. I don't care what they say, the iphone is a half-assed phone, a half-assed media player and a half assed-pda. It gets NONE of those functions right. It has a wonderful browser, and that it it.
I carry one because I got tired of carrying 3 devices, so I settled for a single device that has one good feature and the rest is crap. I previous carried a Zen Vision:M, nice interface, 30GB, 4 hours video, 15 hours audio and it played everything I threw at it, not I have a player that gets about 1.5 hours video, and about 8-10 hours audio, plays 2 formats of audio (mp3 and aac) and plays 2 formats of video. I previously had a PDA that was open enough to allow me to install what I wanted on it with thousands of pieces of software available. My Toshibe e805 was higher resolution, and could act as a USB host to add a mouse and keyboard if I wanted, it could even, with a $20 adapter output to a VGA monitor to allow for powerpoint presentations. It wasn't 3G, but I previously carried a Nokia 6126, which is probably one of their best flip phones.
I DID love those devices, they were all fantastic devices that did their jobs very well. I will not buy another iphone, I will go back to 3 devices when this one dies, and considering the battery problems I am starting to have as I approach the 1 year mark, that is probably going to happen soon. I will miss the great browser on the iphone, but in all honesty, that is the only thing I will miss about the iphone.
[sigh] wankers like you are far more rabid than the average mac user.
And nobody has anything against the average apple user. Perfectly rational reasonable people for the most part I would assume. Just like the average Windows user, or the average Linux user, or the average blackberry user, or the average ebook user. They can accept that not everyone wants the same thing from their consumer elexctronics, and are happy to agree that I want to do something that they don't, so Apple products may not suit my needs..
The embarrassing ones are the ones that take any non devotional statement about Apple as a personal affront. And don't tell me they don't exist.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.
No. One cannot profit while using a cell phone in Canada. They make sure that you pay so much that the only one turning a profit is Bell/Telus/Rogers.
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There is a lag in the keyboard response that wasn't there in 1.1.4. I upgraded my 2G iPhone to 2.0 and have been plagued with this problem. The 2.0.1 update didn't fix it. I don't type fast enough for it to miss my keystrokes, but it is incredibly annoying.
Not Nessasarily true. Ok in the USA, GSM technology may be nascent. Certainly 3G is not so widespread. Here in Europe, especially UK, 3G has been around for much longer. We already make heavy use of it, and you can buy USB dongles with a SIM card, to have mobile internet, at up to 3.6Mbps (in some cases, up to 7Mbps). This is already popular amongst Business users, and also Tennants, who do not wish to fit a DSL line, yet require fast internet. So the technology is pretty mature, and usable.
Yet the iPhone 3G is having problems here too. You cant really blame O2's network, as it is a mature network, that has been around for a long time (O2 used to be BT Cellnet....)
Have a nice day!
http://www.macrumors.com/2008/08/18/iphone-3g-connectivity-affecting-2-of-customers-software-fix-soon/