Why Your Clock Radio Is All Abuzz About iPhones

blackbearnh wrote in with a story that's not really about the iPhone, but if your office speakerphones beep like mine does, read on: "If you own an iPhone, you may have noticed that it has a distinct and very annoying effect on clock radios, computer speakers, car radios, and just about anything else with a speaker. The folks at O'Reilly Media aren't immune, so they set out to discover just what is it about iPhones that makes them such bad RF citizens. The iPhones aren't the only bad apples in the cell phone basket and there's not much you can do about the problem. We're really in an interesting time in that there has never been so many high-powered personal transmitters just wandering loose in the world."

Comments

I really was beginning to wonder...

[greyhueofdoubt]

I really was beginning to wonder if it was just my imagination. I have everything turned off on my iphone except wifi and edge/voice (No 3G around here). At first I thought the little static tantrums were happening at fixed intervals, so I timed it. No luck. Then I had the iPhone connect to the internet through my computer instead of the router so that I could read the logs. Nothing.

Sooo... I tried using a few styles of ferrite RF chokes, I tried wrapping cords into air-core chokes, I tried keeping data and sound lines as far away fro the phone as possible. Nothing seems to work, so to be honest I've pretty much just started using the iPhone's internal speaker when I'm listening to pandora or something.

I'm glad I'm not alone on this, but it kind of sucks. I hate to single out the iPhone, but it's the first phone I've used that did this.

-b

p.s. and having one central app store that will occasionally refuse to let you buy anything due to 'problems with the itunes store' sucks ass. Thanks, Apple. Oh and thanks for not letting us record video, run apps in the background, or let apps access onboard music.

Yeah I woke up crabby today.

Re:Nothing to see here.

[orclevegam]

there's not much you can do other than putting a Faraday cage around the speaker,

...how about putting a Faraday cage around the phone instead?

That would work of course, but really defeats the purpose of having the phone in the first place. I suspect this was intended as flamebait so I'm not going to respond to any further posts along this vein.