Proximity Sensor Presents Latest iPhone 4 Issue

tekgoblin sends news of the latest iPhone 4 glitch being reported in user forums and elsewhere: the phone's proximity sensor seems not to be detecting nearby faces, as it is designed to do, in order to deactivate the screen during a call. The result is often unintended input. "On the iPhone 3GS, the proximity sensor was located to the left of the earpiece speaker. But that space on iPhone 4 is now occupied by the front-facing camera, and the proximity sensor is above the earpiece. What's not clear is whether the iPhone 4 screen's misbehavior is due to the new location of the sensor, or it's because Apple tweaked the sensor's responses in [some] way."

Comments

I've experienced this... very annoying.

[PatHMV]

The antenna issue hasn't bothered me a bit. But this problem affects me every day. Since I got my iPhone, I haven't had one day where at least one call wasn't accidentally disconnected, muted, or interrupted by touchtones as my ear hit various buttons on the keypad. There are a couple of workarounds (use the earphones, or lock the keyboard), but those take time to establish at the beginning of the call.

My bet is that this can be fixed with a simple software update, but I really don't see how Apple could possibly not have found this issue in their testing. Some reports I've seen suggest that the problem goes away if you put it in a case of some sort, so maybe Apple only tested it with those silly cases that made it look like a 3G when they sent it out in the wild for testing, and the case kept it from having the problem.

And it seems to me that they could combine the proximity sensor input with the accelerometer and gyroscope inputs. When you hold the phone within a certain range of angles AND the proximity sensor reads X, then turn off the touchscreen.

just reset from settings/general

[mikeskup]

this seems to be an issue with ios4 (happens on 3gs also) to do with importing from old phone sensor settings on restore...

after some searching found that

  the fix was to go into settings/general/reset all/ then it recalibrated the sensor....

have had zero issues since