Slashdot Mirror
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."
Unfortunately many 3G and 3GS phones have trouble upgrading to iOS 4. They upgrade just fine, but then can no longer connect to the cellular data network and lose visual voicemail and MMS (phone calls and text still work). I'm surprised this story has slipped under the radar so far, since it's impacted a lot more people than the iPhone 4. There's still no official fix other than resetting your phone to factory and not applying previous backups to it ever again, but there are several community fixes of greater or lesser value (some only fix cellular data while leaving MMS and VVM broken, but the correct fix is to delete a specific file from your backup that contains the corrupted APN, reset to factory, and then reapply your modified backup and ignore the error when iTunes complains about not completing the backup).
Apple really seems to have fucked up this time around.
Of course Apple is going to be scrutinized more than any other popular company because they limit their models to one or two. For example, lets say I want a Motorola phone with Android, I don't -have- to get a Droid, I can choose to get a Droid, Droid X, Backflip, Cliq, Devour or i1. A flaw that the Backflip has will probably not be shared with the Droid and a problem with the Droid might be addressed on the Droid X. Apple seems to think that their one phone is the phone for everyone and when it is not, people are going to attack them. Motorola isn't saying that all of their phones are for everyone, they make their own niches, someone who needs a high-end phone is not going to get a Cliq but rather get a Droid (X), someone who wants to get a smartphone on a budget also isn't going to buy the Droid X but instead might go for the i1.
If Apple offered multiple products, they could escape scrutiny because there would be other products to fall back to if one product ended up being terrible and Apple would suffer minimal losses, but since they have a unified phone program, the flaws are much more pronounced.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
I have seen it written somewhere that the proximity sensor issue affects only those who did a "restore from backup" to transfer their settings from an older phone. I can't verify this beyond stating that, having read this, I activated as a new phone, the transferred settings manually. I have had no proximity sensor problems. Now before I get jumped on for defending Apple, let me just say that, yes, this is a problem, and they should sort it asap. But I figured I'd share a potential workaround in case it helps someone.