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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."
We've all made our own Canadian version of the iPhone:
1. take your regular plain old cellphone
2. buy an iPod touch
3. buy duct-tape
4. if you can't figure out step four by yourself, please return your Handyman membership card to Red Green.
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.
Apple sells crappy products! If you stick with a majority company like MS you will have no problems people! http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com/
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?
...it's because you're not praying hard enough. Try prostrating yourself towards Cupertino five times a day.
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...
We have now reached Whiny, artistic types post lengthy diatribes about how this terrible design flaw has made the device unusable and scarred them emotionally.
If J.K.R wrote Windows: Puteulanus fenestra mortalis!
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.
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.
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
No, it needs an iTower. Well i-er anyway.
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
Duh, because it's made by Apple. Part of their laminated Apple Fanboy Membership Card requires them to begin any disparaging comment regarding Apple products with "I love (Apple product name goes here), but..."
Well, Microsoft -did- try and copy Apple when they made Vista...
It's not cognitive dissonance, it's called imagination. The ability to imagine how the iPhone would be if it didn't drop all the time. It is that which he is in love with.
And it can be fixed.
- These characters were randomly selected.
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
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?
I think what he is trying to say "When it works, its works better than anything else out there in terms of functionality or meeting my personal preference."
Its like old Ultima Online. I loved to play that game to death but the game client was so damn buggy it crashed all the damn time.
It was a very love hate relationship. Sure I could play text muds, but it wasn't the same.
Hope that makes.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
a nice girl like you doesn't need a penis
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
What's wrong with you? How would you "love" your phone if you can't use it for its primary purpose?
Personally, because I despise its primary purpose, but am obligated to carry a cell phone with me.
Unfortunately, my iPhone has so far been way more reliable than my old Sony-Erickson. Anyone know how to enable this poor reception feature?
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.
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)
A feature list does not a product make. If (like me) you were keeping an eye out for a decent, featureful phone in the years before the iPhone came out, then you probably noticed a few phones with incredible feature lists that major phone companies developed but never sold in major markets. Despite the phones' impressive feature lists, they weren't good enough to carry the company logo in a major market like Japan, Korea, or the US. The ones they did sell in the US were just barely usable enough for buyers who craved those features and were willing to put up with a lot of clunkiness, so you can imagine how bad the phones were that they only sold in China.
So then the iPhone came out, and I was like, "Yay, now someone has figured out how to make a feature-filled phone with a decent interface that isn't the size of my fist. Any day now some non-evil carrier will have one. Yay! I can't wait." And I waited for a frickin' year while the cell phone companies continued to come out with crap. I was counting on them to AT LEAST clone the iPhone and come out with a "good-enough" copy of it, maybe a year behind and slightly less stylish, but what does that matter to a hopeless dork like me anyway.
Well, they did take the iPhone seriously. They ran around saying "iPhone competitor" and "iPhone killer" so often it sounded like a religious mantra. But if you judged by the phones they released, it was like they had never seen an iPhone before. They kept making awkward stylus-based smart phones and cooked up a few pathetic "iPhone competitors" like the LG Venus. It became clear that not only were the cell phone makers not going to match the iPhone in 2008, they aren't even on pace to match the original iPhone for years. Certainly not in 2009, unless an Android-based product turns out to have an Apple-like (i.e., highly polished right off the bat) debut.
So today, this very minute actually, I'm walking out the door to buy an iPhone. (How many times I've posted something on Slashdot in defense of the iPhone and wished I could say that! Um, well, two or three times at least.)
I'll sell my soul to AT&T, despite their shameful cooperation with the un-American acts of my embarrassingly un-American American government, because the gap between the iPhone and second-best is just too embarrassingly large. I won't put up with it anymore.
And as usual I'll add my caveat that I'm not interested in a Blackberry, "smart phone," or PDA, so I'm not claiming the iPhone is the clear leader, or even the best product, in those markets.