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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."
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.
Will Apple offer a free
lol good one
...suggests that they depend on heavy marketing and legal scare tactics rather than good engineering practices to sell a product.
Yes, the iPhone, and indeed Apple's entire product line, clearly demonstrates that their engineering is far behind the competition's.
/. as of late.
Let me guess, you don't regularly use an iPhone or an Apple computer or OS X? But you don't want to be left out of the fervent Apple backlash that's taken over
I had the original iPhone, and it was an exceptional work of engineering. I recently upgraded to the iPhone 4, and it again seems like an excellent work of engineering. I'm only speaking from personal experience, but I haven't had a problem with the antenna or a single dropped call to date. The huge success of the iPhone has placed it under an intense spotlight, and as it's the current "king of the hill," everyone's out to expose its blemishes and blow them out of proportion. As such, these critiques need to be taken with a grain of salt, and given time to see if they represent real issues among users, or anti-Apple fud.
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.
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
locked out of this slashdot account for 10+ years... Im back