Android vs. iPhone 4 Signal Strength Bars Comparison

thisisauniqueid writes "In light of the clamor over the iPhone 4 Grip of Death, AnandTech recently reverse-engineered the phone's signal-strength-to-bars mapping. Because Android is open source, we can determine the corresponding mapping for Android in combination with the 3GPP spec referenced in the source, allowing the signal-strength-to-bars mapping for both Android and the iPhone 4 to be plotted on the same axes. This shows that the iPhone 4 consistently reports a higher percentage signal strength (as defined by the fraction of bars lit) than Android GSM devices at the same signal strength."

Comments

Re:Smelly code!

[BitZtream]

Ahh spoken by someone who cares more about what some guy in a book calls a style of coding than actually getting the job done.

Let me give you a hint, when you spend more time naming 'principles' than you do actually listing a real reason its bad then you make it clear you aren't actually a programmer, you're just a graduate that thinks he has a clue.

I'm sure you're one of those people that claims its never acceptable to use a goto either, to which the simple response is ... you don't know how your language works since when it comes right down to it, an if statement is a goto.

Re:Two antennas!

[PopeRatzo]

The question is, why on Earth did they not test the phones properly? And by properly, I mean in real world circumstances.

They probably did. If you were a tester at Apple, would you want to bear bad news?

"Um, excuse me, but I notice that when I hold the phone I have signal problems"

"I'm sorry, but that's just not possible"

"Um, maybe some sort of insulation could be used to keep users' hands from making contact with both antennae"

"And spoil the lines? Do you lilke working here, Brad? You seem to have some attitude issues. You might want to think carefully about whether there's really any so-called "signal problem". And I notice you're not wearing all your flair today."

Re:dB attenuation?

[afabbro]

An alternative could be to have it show a percentage between 0 and 100.

Why not colors?.

Why not puffy pink clouds with dancing rainbow-striped unicorns?

Fine

[Lars T.]

Now all they have to do is reverse engenier the actual correspondence between bars displayed and signal strength on each and every Android phone model just to be sure nobody changed the actual deployed code.