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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."
Add this latest story to the antenna issue, and it's looking like Apple shipped a rotten one. You can't have a big win every time without some risk of losing once in a while. Be glad if you're holding on to an iPhone 3G(s) from last year... you got most of the good features from the new operating system while the new hardware doesn't seem ready for prime time. Give them a year to fix the problems, and we'll wait for the iPhone 4G...
You know, it sounds like most of these problems would have been figured out if people had tested them in the field for a few weeks before sending them to the factory. But Apple's causing people to commit suicide for losing a prototype, aggressive legal action, etc., suggests that they depend on heavy marketing and legal scare tactics rather than good engineering practices to sell a product.
Soon it will be "Wait until they release the first service pack before you use it," or "Wait until they revise the hardware at least twice before buying it." ... Sigh.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
I think I have had enough of Apple at this point. I can guarantee that I will jump ship to HTC's EVO phone by December this year.
Now let's wait for the Apple fanboys who will see no wrong on Apple's part.
This was another case where the industrial designers beat the engineers. The engineers wanted a proximity sensor that responded to faces. The industrial designers wanted a proximity detector that responded to beautiful, serene, or uncharacteristically creative faces... No problems were encountered during testing.
What the f is an "industrial designer"? and how is that different from any other kind of product designer?
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Mark me as redundant, but haven't people learned already that first-gen Apple products are suspect to major flaws? (Even though iteration-wise, this is the 4th iteration of the iPhone, of course, realistically this is a Apple product with brand new hardware and design, akin to going from the PPC Powerbooks to the Intel Macbooks).
I dub this new iPhone as the iPhone Vista!
People only get into "OMIGODSCANDAL" mode when it's Apple for some reason.
Because its only Apple who seems to think that their products are flawless. Its only Apple who takes design over practicality. Only Apple would have designed the Apple III the way it was, and it was probably only Apple (well, cheap Chinese counterfeits aside...) who would design a product like the iPhone 4 and then say to your customers you are holding it wrong.
Its only Apple who thinks that one product can be perfect for everyone, from the serious developer and power user to Joe Six-Pack. Other companies diversify to give each niche their own product at cheap price points.
Yes, occasionally Apple just -gets- something right, a lot of the ideas from the iPhone were great, the implementation wasn't as good, but the idea of a great browser, captive touch-screen, and multi-touch gestures were a great idea and truly helped make the smartphones of today what they are today. But other times their implementation is just dead wrong and Apple has to "backtrack" from earlier statements to get ahead you know things like there will be no SDK for the iPhone, no copy/paste, no multi-tasking, etc.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Its only Apple who takes design over practicality.
There was a day when the word 'design' MEANT 'building things that solve practical problems in efficient ways'. You 'designed an engine' or 'designed a computer'. When you said 'design' it meant 'how a thing works'.
Now it seems to be code for 'putting a thin layer of pretty looks on the top of someone else's actual engineering'. As in 'we need to update our phone's design - red with curved corners is so 2009, don't you think?' With the result that 'design' now seems to be the OPPOSITE of actual design: it doesn't think deeply about the purpose or materials of anything or its place in the world, it doesn't solve practical problems, at the very most it builds user interfaces - but more likely it doesn't even do that, just picks the shade of pixels on the .jpg on the skin on the theme pack.
Can we please stop torturing the English language and get designers who know how to design things (and not just looks) again?
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
Its only Apple who thinks that one product can be perfect for everyone, from the serious developer and power user to Joe Six-Pack.
See, I always read this on Slashdot, and then I read "I love my iPhone" everywhere else. I don't think Apple ever said they were to be all things to all people. They try to be the important things to most people. And that's how they succeed. They find out what people want to do, focus on those features and make them basically perfect and intuitive, and then disable anything that doesn't work right enough of the time or which gets in the way of the important things. I was sick of buying phones with feature lists the length of my arm--none of which worked reliably enough for me to ever really mess with them. With the iPhone, I actually use those things. I use them because they work. Every time.
Finally, just to put this out there again: I live in Japan; I have had none of the signal/net-speed issues I hear about all over the internet. None. None. Never once a dropped call. It's not the phone; it's the network.
So come on, what are the advantages? What is the reason people get so territorial whenever Apple is brought up?
Why so territorial? If that's true I think it's probably because people who use Apple products tend to really like them. I really like my Macbook Pro laptop! When's the last time you heard someone gush about a Dell laptop? Obviously Apple is a favorite target of people who hate Apple (on eg Slashdot) and so it's not surprising that when people make statements like "The closedness, lack of features and general asshattery of Apple" when it's clear they know virtually nothing about Apple, that Apple users defend products they like.
Read the power connector frontpage article on slashdot right now. How many people do you see saying "I LOVE my Dell power connector!" or "I would love to see laptop power connectors standardized on my Acer connector, it's great!" None. You see a crap load of people talking about how great Magsafe is though (and it is, it's great!). I think that sums up the situation really well...Apple designs things REALLY well. Apple software and hardware is full of little touches like that. OSX is a nice operating system that also happens to be based on a unix/bsd core, with full commandline, singleuser mode, etc. It's also got a really polished gui. The iPhone is a really polished phone that most people really seem to like.
Really? You can't run OS X on any hardware, or at least any hardware that can run Windows? I didn't know this and if it's true, it's a huge weakness imposed by Apple to keep people who like OS X buying their hardware. If a Mac can run OS X, Win and Linux, then (barring artificial limitations) a computer containing the exact same hardware can surely do the same.
Right, Apple limits OSX to only running on Apple hardware. Like I said, there IS a Hackintosh movement which while technically against licensing rules by Apple also seems to be utterly ignored by Apple. I've run 10.4 and 10.5 on generic PC hardware and it works very well. Since the base of OSX is open source, I even recompiled one of my ATA drivers to add support for an unsupported chipset. Not bad.
The bottomline--Apple designs solid products. Apple designs products that people like. As I said before, you've got the time to spend researching parts and building computers--that's great, and it's fun, but I don't have that time anymore. OSX is -- and of course IMHO -- a far more polished operating system than Windows, the Linuxes, etc. That's why I'm reduced to buying Dell desktops at work and why I choose to use an Apple laptop as my main computer. I think most people who, for instance, try an OSX laptop for a month, understand this.
I would never go so far as to claim that Apple products are for everybody though...I personally think it's great that there is competition.
you used the term "polished" three times. this, and other ambiguous terms like "user experience" seem common in posts extolling the virtues of the Apple. what does "polished" mean? what is the value of such a thing?
can you provide any specific example of how, for instance, the polish allows you to do X on an Apple product faster/easier/better/? than on an Android phone or Windows desktop?
-Lod