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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."
It is extremely frustrating the amount of dropped calls and call failed's I get. I had a sony-erickson for 3 years and had maybe 3 or 4 dropped calls and maybe 2 or 3 times when i cannot make a call. I do those numbers in like 3 days of iphone use. It is not my area, I always have 3g, but the bars do fluctuate wildly from 1 or 2 to 3 or 4 in the same location. I love the phone but i am worried if this is a problem they can fix or will it get worse?
My reception's fine, but I really wish Apple would hurry up and fix the slow typing bug...
It sounds like a trivial thing, but coupled with the inherent inaccuracy of the iPhone keyboard it makes the phone barely usable for text messaging...
There are several reasons that might lead to these
problems:
- bad antenna design
- interference noise from other electronics in the handset
- bugs in protocol processing
The most surprising aspect is that Apple and AT&T
probably knew about this much before the launch. The
amount of testing required on a cell phone to get
certification is enormous. Unless, at&t waived all testing for the iphone, it is pretty certain that they have seen the problems in the lab. And
this is the question. How can they release the
product if they know it has problems?
For anyone interested see the process for GCF and PTRCB certifications, that include both
Over-The-Air tests, drive tests and protocol tests.
AT&T has had these kind of problems for years with their 3G service, it only took a successful platform to bring their shortcomings into the public light.
Mine is Good
I don't think you understood the problem - difficulty typing on the touchscreen is one issue, but apparently people are also getting sluggish response from it, which is a separate issue. Way to pin it on fat fingers, though.
And from another source there have been information that the Infineon chipset never had been tested in a production environment.
And if it is the chipset it may be possible that a software upgrade is insufficient.
So I suspect that we haven't heard the last of this story yet.
At least - this is the danger of being the first on new technology, and I'm happy that I didn't buy the iPhone. Even if it is a good design it seems to be more design and less function.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
I've been using 3G in one of the pilot cities since it rolled out many years ago and the problem has always been limited coverage. Even now that the infrastructure is more mature. Going from 3G to non-3G networks isn't a smooth transition, so you might have a very weak signal where there is potential to have a better one.
Go buy a European phone that only works on our 1900MHz frequency and you'll see how limited certain types of coverage can be.
There's a horrible lag on the keyboards. I know I have a lag on mine. I could type an entire word and still wait a second before it pops up. At that point you gotta hope you didn't have a typo, or at least not a typo that autocorrection won't fix.
On a different note, how do you get it to learn new words? I have it autocorrecting the same words all the time no matter how often I tell it not to.