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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."
What's interesting is the fact that even after this and other numerous problems with this particular device, majority of the post (on /., Engadget, Apple forums etc) about them would include something like "I love the phont, but..."
What's wrong with you? How would you "love" your phone if you can't use it for its primary purpose? Is it mandatory to "love" this phone? Would you burn in hell if you don't? Or most of the people just lack balls to say that you don't "love" it anymore?
Mass acceptance by following the herd is one thing, not having guts to call a spade a spade is another.
... except that, from all appearances, this actually is a terrible design flaw, and it can neither be described as "minor" nor "rarely-occurring".
Kind of sad that this is the first thing on peoples' minds. Would you not prefer Apple to recall the phones for a fix, or issue a firmware update that takes care of the problem? No.... you were wronged and therefore must sue.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
I'm calling shenanigans on your comment. Sounds way too much like astroturfing with that last line.
Unfortunately, legal action, or threat thereof, is often the only way of inducing a company to recall, update, patch, refund, or otherwise ameliorate one of their fuckups.
Some lawsuits are about vengeance; but that doesn't mean that lawsuits aren't a legitimate means of obtaining redress.
By what I've read on the net it seems like every new iPhone is affected.
Don't believe everything you read on the internet. Many iPhones have absolutely no problems, including mine (UK, on O2 network). It is worth considering that most people with a problem will complain, whereas most without one won't bother visiting discussion groups etc.
I don't know if this is a joke or not... The general drive to push products at an increasing speed forces the manufacturers to push out sub-standard devices on the market.
And many of the devices are programmed mainly in C/C++ which we all know is a double-edged technology since it gives good performance but it is also prone to weird bugs like wild pointers etc.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
We've got one _securities_ (not engineering) analyst speculating that it's a problem with the chipset, and that it's unfixable. Yeah. Then we've got Businessweek echoing that claim, citing two unnamed sources (one of which is probably the securities analyst, the other of which is likely someone repeating the securities analyst). No technical data whatsoever on those claims.
Then we've got Ny Teknik, which cites a problem between the antenna and the amplifier (I would speculate they are referring to antenna impedence matching). They again cite unnamed sources, but they at least claim there was actual testing done. If this is the case, it would not be fixable in firmware, but it's at least not a design flaw.
On top of that, there's the nature of the problems. Poor signal strength and low speeds both could be caused by the problems of the nature Ny Teknik suggests, but dropping calls when switching from 3G to Edge argues for some sort of firmware problem, dropping calls during the handoff. Of course, it's also possible there are multiple problems; low signal strength exposes a problem with the handoff.
Finally there's the question of how Apple missed it during testing. It seems widespread enough that it would have been noticed, which argues for a manufacturing problem or perhaps a last minute software change.
I apologize for my lack of clarity, see Xenocrates. I bought the new one because the mobile internet access tools are worth it. I've decided that having seamless email, some web, and relatively updated maps are indeed worth it. As to the other poster "never" having lost an AT&T call: Bullshit. Unprovable, and clearly this thread's existence posits that the opposite might be true. (It is certainly true, but I'll stick to the more conservative case.)
1) Samsung handsets use the same Infineon 3G chipset and side by side have been shown to not have the same problems as the iphone
2)I have an iphone. It worked great for 1 week and then the data service stopped working.
The phone hasnt changed. It's a network issue. As more iphones have come on in big cities they just cant serve the demand.
So its the phone which could be performing better (as seen by the side by side Sansung comparison) >and its the network (as seen by many people whose service only recently went to hell but used to be fine)
Some lawsuits are about vengeance; but that doesn't mean that lawsuits aren't a legitimate means of obtaining redress.
True. It just means that you're American.
(tongue only partly in cheek)
myselfmusic
Don't forget that there is an army of PR-people working for iPhone competitors in Scandinavia as well as in Japan. There's been a lot of weird articles in Sweden with headlines like "The iPhone Fiasko" and such, and in every single article there has only been anonymous sources but no hard numbers or any facts what so ever. Of course, that might be surprise to no one. After all, this is still Ericsson County