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iPhone 4 Reception Recall Ruckus Roundup
Readers today have been sending tons of stories about the iPhone 4, so here are a few of the highlights: Following the Consumers Reports announcement that the iPhone has antenna problems, Andy Patrizio asks if Apple can withstand the pressure to recall, while CNet estimates that a recall would cost them $1.5B. But that's just the latest on the iPhone 4 — the long running carrier exclusivity lawsuit rumors have been upgraded to Class Action status.
CNet estimates that a A recall would cost them $1.5B
It's not only that cost. In 3 days Apple's stock has gone down a huge 5%, costing Apple and their shareholders millions of dollars and creating huge image problems.
It also look like Apple's PR team completely messed up, from the "learn a new way to hold a phone" to removing of any critical comments from their support forums. Considering PR and marketing is one of Apple's strongest areas and which pushes everything they do forward, they did some incredibly stupid decisions.
Now that they are basically ignoring the problem, any more time they take doing nothing will cost them even more.
How you like them Apples?
I already returned my iPhone 4, barely got it out of the box before return shipping. Droid X looks like it'll be replacing my half-functional iPhone 3G tomorrow.
There's a spot in User Info for World of Warcraft account names? Really?
Jobs is too arrogant to allow a recall...they'll find a way to blame customers for this eventually, or weasel out of doing a full recall.
So what we're saying is that the new iPhone is getting a bad reception??? :)
Take Nobody's Word For It.
With all the Apple publicity they probably made an extra $1.5 billion. It's not like the iphone is gods gift, anyone ever been to europe/asia? They had phones like this five years ago.
If they dont release a patch, their stock will be useful only as wallpaper by the weekend.
Except, that is what many savvy investors are counting on, because the fall in their stock price is really a reaction of fear.
Savvy investors never trade on emotion, and they bank on the emotion of others by reading the emotions that drive the market. This still works because the majority of those who trade stocks are still very emotional.
Apple basically shot themselves in the foot, and their wounds are bound to heal. That is far better than if someone else (like MS) shot them and they got hurt, as that would be a sign of vulnurability to competition.
That puts the share price at a mere 177% of its value 1 year ago. Their investors must be pissed!
The problem is the antennas being shorted by a slightly conductive (sweaty) finger bridging one or more of the three breaks.
Apple doesn't need a recall to fix the problem: future phones can have a coating, and a free bumper ($10 cost to Apple) to existing customers solves all the problems.
At 2M iPhones, the "recall fix" would be a whopping $20M.
Test your net with Netalyzr
Look, I love Apple products. I own / have owned a MacBook Pro, 2 iMacs, an iPod 2G, an iPhone 3GS, an iPad, an Airport Express, and an iPod shuffle. I get it.
But, seriously Apple, you did a recall with the MacBook battery issue. You replaced batteries and even though it cost you some money your karma was helped by it. Do the same with the iPhone 4... offer owners a case which you test to make sure fixes the problem. It will probably cost you $20 per for these including shipping and processing assuming you can get the cases for $4 or so. But you will instantly shut up the majority of people who are complaining VERY loudly about the problem AND you will have "done the right thing".
NO company is capable of 100% preventing mistakes, but it's how you act as a company that determines how you're perceived. You can be cool and hip all you want but if customers are afraid to purchase your products because you've stuck to your guns and forced lawsuits to happen you lose in the long run.
I'm very disappointed in the way they've handled this. The least they could do is issue certificates for free bumpers IMMEDIATELY for any iPhone 4 owners who want one, in addition to waiving the restocking fee (which they already did). That would have done a lot to shore up customer loyalty and keep their image good.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
The reason I have passed on ALL of the iPhones so far is I don't buy into the hype, not to mention a LOCKED OS. Hey, if you just pick up a phone to use it, then perhaps the iPhone is for you, but, if you are a "tinker" type, I don't see how the iPhone would be good. Even given all of the faults with WinMobile, at least you can hack it til the cows come home. The way I look at it is it is MY phone, and I'll screw around with it how I want to. I don't like "locked" phones. My current phone, HTC Rhodium (Tilt2) never even had the stock OS fired up. I told the guy at the at&t store that I would set it up later (since I already had a Touch Pro). Took it home, unlocked it, wiped out the stock OS and put one from XDA-Developers on it and tweaked it exactly how I wanted. Job's & Company have a MAJOR public relations nightmare on their hands, and a golden opportunity for some of their competitors to run ads that exploit this problem.
... that my iPhone 4 is outperforming my 3GS, in terms of 3G connection quality and reliability, sometimes to pretty miraculous degree, such as at the train station I wait at every work day, where my 3GS's signal would jump up and down and go away and come back and even when it was showing 5 bars the performance was horrendous. With the iPhone 4 I can in fact reproduce the signal drop when held in my left hand, going pretty dramatically from 4 bars to only 1, but even at 1 bar the performance is outstanding and for the first time ever I've got a 100% reliable and fast connection here. I can stream audio and browse the web and it's fast, even at 1 bar. At 4 bars if not left handed.
So I'm not downplaying the drop in signal strength issue, as that is there when you hold it left handed (and I do usually), but that in practice it performs better, even a lot better, then my iPhone 3GS. So is the antenna flawed or not? I would say that it is flawed, but only from a PR standpoint. It's a public relations disaster, brought only by people who don't have an iPhone 4 and who seem to have a vendetta against Apple for not making a phone that they want, and due to magazines like Consumers Reports, who aren't seeing the forest for the trees. They are focusing solely on that there is a drop, and ignoring how it performs in practice. You need to just use the phone and see how it works for you, and most, I suspect, once they stop staring at the signal strength gauge, are going to find that it does better then their previous phone, even by a wide margin. The iPhone 4 is a great phone. Yes, you should put a case on it, as that will reduce the signal drop issue, but that issue is not nearly as big of an issue as it is being made out to be. It's not a non-issue, it just not the main thing you should be concerned about. You should be concerned about how it performs in practice, and the iPhone 4 excels there.
--- What?
Cannot admit: iPhone4 irradiates you when you hold it wrong. It may appear that the iPhone4 gives you cancer.
Manufacturing: There may be a manufacturing component to it as well. We know they were rushed out the door without even time for the touchscreen bonding glue to dry. Clearly the Foxconn QA was not followed. If an engineer leaves a thumbprint on an internal antenna it detunes it. Imagine what a rushed assembly with leaky glue would do to the tuning characteristics.
Cannot admit: Apply don't pay their manufacturers enough and circumvent their own QA guidelines to rush product to market. They may appear like greedy bastards.
AT&T: The drop problem is also in a small, small part down to AT&T's 3G network topology. Nowhere near as bad as the old iPhone problem of congesting the signalling channels, this is simply due to the fact that 3G signals are way more sensitive to received signal strength. When you hold it the wrong way not only does the handset not heat the base station well (showing fewer bars on the phone) but it is the network that cannot hear the iPhone that causes the call drops as your entire hand and arm are radiating instead of the antenna. When you broadly detune the antenna with your hand the lower powered 3G signal is simply too feint and distorted to be heard by the base station. It does explain why the locations where the issues appear are random and seemingly not related in all cases to the downlink signal strength shown on the handset. RF signals are like that.
Cannot admit: The issue clearly isn't all to do with AT&T and they blamed them the last time with the 3GS.
It would cost them a LOT more than that. If the letter A were recalled, they'd be Pple Corportion.
And they'd sell iPds instead of iPads. Their stock symbol would have to change from AAPL to PL - but that's taken, and so is PPL. PPLE is available, but pple.com is owned by a squatter.
And it's not just Apple. If the letter A were recalled:
About the only good thing about recalling the letter a is that vaginas stay vgins - no matter how many times they're poked! Hmmm, on second thought, maybe it's worth 1.5 billion.
Anand found that gripping the iPhone 4 a certain way could indeed cause up to 24dB of signal drop. This was worst-case, with a sweaty deathgrip. Touching more lightly or with less moisture had less of an effect. Gripping other smartphones near their antennas also caused a drop in signal.
The non-linear signal representation of the "bars" can also lead to some confusion related to this. The valid range is between -113dB (no signal) and -51dB (full signal). However, 5 bars represents the range of -51 to -91. 4 bars is -91 to -101. 3 bars is -101 to -103. 2 bars is -103 to -107. 1 bar is -107 to -113. If you have a full strength 5 bar connection, that 24dB drop won't even move you out of the 5th bar. If you've just barely got 5 bars, the same 24dB drop can put you down to 1 or 0 bars.
Anand's testing also confirmed what sjonke said in the comment above. Even when it was showing the same signal strength, the iPhone 4 was better at not dropping calls compared to the 3GS. The page shows a screenshot of a 625/31 run on Speedtest.net during a call with only -113dB.
Freedom isn't free, and by buying and jailbreaking an iPhone you financially support Apple's douchebaggery and encourage the development of more crippled, locked down systems, perhaps with more effective jails.
Why do that when you can have an Android phone which you're encouraged to hack on, with real multi-tasking and an open source OS?
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Defense Lawyer: "Can it be used to make phone calls?"
Expert Witness: "Well...yeah, but it's reception isn't as good as it could be."
Defense Lawyer: "Is the reception worse than most other phones on the market?"
Expert Witness: "Well no, but..."
Judge: "Next case please."
I'm not surprised that that the iPhone 4 isn't absolutely perfect in every way. No product is. This is a pretty minor issue that has been blown out of proportion. If I were in charge of Apple I would just give out those 'bumpers' for free and hope this all blows over.
I have to support hundreds of iMacs and MacBooks at work, and I've had to call in tons of warranty repairs the last couple years (easily 10x than from our pool of HP and Dell machines). I thought maybe apple was ditching quality on the macs in favor of the iPhone, iPod, because of iTunes $$$, but it seems they're just neglecting quality across the board. It doesn't "just work" anymore; it just looks pretty (until the style looks outdated).
Jail. Break. The iPhone is just as hackable as other systems out there.
That's like telling people to adopt Christianity, because it doesn't actually stop you from committing the sins you like.
I have a 3gs from beginning of this year so I'm not eligible, but my wife is and has been waiting for a few months for the 4g to come out.
It now looks like she is going to either wait for apple to issue a fix or go with an android phone. If anything I know she is not alone and I'd guess she probably represents 2 or 3% of potential customers that are now not going to buy this device.
"(I) have this unfortunate condition that causes me not to believe a single thing any politician says when a mic's on.
Seconded. I've yet to get an iPhone, but I've got a friend who picked up a couple 4s right when they came out. He couldn't be happier. Even though they do lose some signal with the right grip, in daily use they drop fewer calls and have better sound quality than Blackberries/Palms/other phones he's used. So it's hard for him to get too worked up about this issue.
And American phone subsidies notwithstanding, it's a $600 device. If you care about your phone, buy a freaking case or bumper already! And/or a bluetooth headset. You don't have to be that kid sitting in Starbucks showing off just how spendy a phone your parents bought you.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Link or lies! A 4bar drop to 0 has never happened to any of my phones no matter how I hold them.
Let me google that for you (Nexus One)
There were videos around for other phone if you simply do a search.
If you can't replicate the problem, then you are simply in the same boat as iPhone 4 owners who can't replicate the problem it's supposed to have either (I know a few iPhone 4 users that cannot get the signal to drop, and athough I've been able to reproduce it I can't get it to happen all the time).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I have an engineering background and while I have by no means conducted a scientific study, I can tell you with utmost certainty that the iPhone4 does hardly has a signal reception problem.
It has a signal TRANSMISSION problem.
I've done quite a lot of mucking around with speed test apps on the device and I have observed that while touching the left gap between antennas does cause a marginal decrease in download speed, the signal is by no means blocked. To me, it appears the device can still hear the signal from the tower pretty well even with a human hand to detune the antenna.
Upload speeds, on the other hand, are severely crippled or blocked altogether. It appears that touching the gap has an extremely negative impact on the device's ability to emit a signal strong enough for the tower to hear. This theory is supported by call tests I conducted in which the other party was unable to hear me whenever the gap was touched, even though I could hear their voice just fine.
Quite by accident, I also happened to set my phone down next to a set of computer speakers which were very sensitive to cell phone radio interference, resulting in the typical "GSM Buzz" which most of you of you have surely experienced. What I discovered was that a single fingertip over the gap would almost completely eliminate the speaker buzz due to the interference. Touching anywhere else on the device had no discernible effect. Once again, it would appear that touching the gap severely hinders outgoing transmissions from the device, even over extremely short distances.
As I said, these observations are about as un-scientific as it gets, so feel free to draw your own conclusions. But as far as I can tell, touching the gap is enough to stop your phone's outgoing signal from ever reaching the tower, and a tower which thinks your phone is no longer there isn't going to maintain your call for very long.
I've seen videos from Wired and Engadget of picking up the phone and letting it rest comfortable in your hand where the signal goes from 4 bars to No Signal.
Even the most ardent Pro-Apple sites have confirmed in their testing that this is a serious problem.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
I was about to wonder about your problems till I saw that last part...you're running iTunes on Windows?
I've run all of this on a mac (older one granted, a G5 Tower I got cheap)...and no problems at all. I'd dare say if you run Apple stuff on Apple products...9 times out of 10, it does just work. Mixing MS windows in the equation is likely asking for trouble.
Oh, so it only crashes, erases songs, etc for 90% of their customers. THAT'S PRETTY GOOD!!! [/sarcasm, if you couldn't tell]
The shitty quality of iTunes and Quicktime on Windows is simply inexcusable. *Especially* since they have other applications, like Safari, that run quite well on Windows. Hell, even is Windows was the one with the 5% marketshare, it would *still* be inexcusable.
iTunes, by virtue of its scummy buggy-ass drivers and services, is the *only* application I've seen on Windows 7 that can still lock-up completely unrelated applications. (In my case, World of Warcraft locked-up for a solid 4 minutes while iTunes was updating my phone's firmware. Figure THAT one out!)
Comment of the year
I've had an iPhone 4 for a few weeks now, and largely it works 99% as promised. IMHO there are bigger bugs than the "don't touch here" antenna problem!
1. Overheating shutdown... (I think). If the phone is in my pocket, sometimes I take it out and it's off... I'm guessing it is overheating (hot down here in Texas...)
2. GSM unit crashes... I sometimes venture out into the boonies and sometimes the gsm system just stops working with spotty coverage in hilly areas. When I return to a city with a strong signal, the unit never comes back up and signal strength stays at 0-1 bars.
3. Occasional app crashes... sometimes an app just crashes, usually one of the older apps like facebook, rope n'fly and a couple of other games. It's actually really rare, and I don't seem to loose anything, so it's minor at this point. These apps were rock solid on my 3gs phone, so that's why I mention it.
Overall I'm pretty happy the experience though... it's a lot faster. The voice quality is much better. The screen is fantastic. If #1 and #2 can be fixed then it would be fantastic, otherwise I'll return it and wait for iPhone 4.1...
I said no... but I missed and it came out yes.