Nokia and RIM Respond To Apple's Antenna Claims

awyeah writes "In response to Apple's press conference, where videos of a few devices were shown losing signal bars with a tight grip, RIM and Nokia have both taken shots at Apple. RIM's co-CEOs say that Apple's claims 'appear to be deliberate attempts to distort the public's understanding of an antenna design issue and to deflect attention from Apple's difficult situation.' Meanwhile, Nokia, noting that they are pioneers in antenna design and were the first company to bring to market a phone with an internal antenna, prioritizes 'antenna performance over physical design if they are ever in conflict.'"

Comments

Steve and his FUD

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple says the iPhone 4 drops one more call per 100 calls. So only 1%. No big deal. But Stevie left something out. How many calls are dropped per 100? He's good at this game; he didn't say. AT&T claims their dropped call rate is 1.4%. 1.4% + 1% is 2.4%. That's a 70% increase. 70% is quite a bit, especially when the antenna is supposed to be better than the previous generation. Yes, Mr. Jobs, "Antennagate" is real.

Re:Steve and his FUD

[Wingsy]

He left it out because ATT told him to. That information is confidential to ATT, so how can you blame Steve for not telling you? (You're good at your game too.)

Re:Steve and his FUD

[Anonymous Coward]

Heard Leo Laporte on his show today (Saturday) that he had more then 4 dropped calls, all from different callers. Obviously for any "cellular" and/or land line based system, one dropped call is one too many.

For my VoIP system, Skype, I do not have any dropped calls, of course its not cellular either.

Based on Leo's comments, my guess is the dropped call rate is actually much higher, much worse than what is being stated publicly.

Re:Steve and his FUD

[Anonymous Coward]

Was it 1 out of 100 more calls dropped, or a 1% higher dropped call rate than the 3GS?

Re:Steve and his FUD

[LBArrettAnderson]

1 more dropped call per 100 calls. http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/16/apple-iphone-4-drops-less-than-one-additional-call-per-100-tha/

Re:Steve and his FUD

[LBArrettAnderson]

That's what he said, and there may be some truth to that, but that isn't the point. That information is available on the internet, and with it, we see that the problem is actually much more severe than he made it sound. He knew very well that most people would understand what he said incorrectly, ie, "oh, there are only 1% more dropped calls than with the 3GS."

Re:Steve and his FUD

[Wingsy]

Ohhhh.... the information that ATT was holding as confidential is "on the internet". Trusty source, that internet.

Re:Steve and his FUD

[TubeSteak]

Apple says the iPhone 4 drops one more call per 100 calls.

How to Lie With Statistics 101:

Fact 1: iPhone4 only drops an additional 1 per 100 calls compared to the competitors.
Fact 2: Millions of calls are made per day using the iPhone v4.

The Lie: Omitting any mention of what a +1% increase in dropped calls really means when applied to millions of calls.

Re:Steve and his FUD

[PopeRatzo]

He left it out because ATT told him to.

And you know this how?

Re:Steve and his FUD

[otuz]

Not necessarily. If the drop rate for 3GS is as low as 0.4%, that plus "less than 1%" would equal just the average.

Re:Steve and his FUD

[PopeRatzo]

Trusty source, that internet.

So, you believe a CEO's claims about his own product are necessarily more truthful than "the internet"?

Re:Steve and his FUD

[Wingsy]

Because I do not think Jobs lied about it when he said so in the press conference. Did you listen to it or watch it?

Re:Steve and his FUD

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but 97.6% uptime, that's still one nine! Pretty good for Apple! Way better than I ever got on my goddamned iPhone... (still zero dropped calls on Verizon/Incredible after two months!) Not so good for telecom, though. I suspect Apple/AT&T is a major driver of the growth of texting over phone calls.

Another funny numbers game Steve played. He claimed only .55% of iPhone 4 users have called in to complain so far. But ya know... after years and years of Apple denying any problems with the iPhone, MacBook Pro (constant kernel panics that mysteriously went away with a patch about a year later, but there was never any problem, noooo; the high-pitched whining sound, the ball-basting heat, etc.)... and censoring any mention of these problems from these forums; after seeing thousands of people complaining about the issue on the Internet-- maybe people figured it wasn't worth their time to call in. Obviously Apple knew about the problem, and obviously they'd eventually have to give out free bumpers, because this was too big to ignore. So why waste your time waiting to talk to a tech support rep who is paid to lie to you about the problem? Let them try stonewalling for a month or so, let them trash their own reputation by treating their customers like crap-- plenty of others will call. It's not like you'll be telling them something they don't know.

Re:Steve and his FUD

[Wingsy]

I believe we're talking about whether or not it is the truth that ATT asked Jobs not to reveal the actual dropped call rate, not a product claim. So yeah, I'd believe him over "the internet" since lying about this would be so easy to discover (ATT says "we did not") and very damaging if he did.

Re:Steve and his FUD

[PopeRatzo]

1 more dropped call per 100 calls.

Let's say you had no phone service one day out of 100. Would that be acceptable to you?

So Jobs says the iPhone 4 drops 1 more call per 100 than the 3GS, which was not among the cellular phones with the most reliable connections. So, does the number go from 20 to 21 out of 100? Or from 10 to 11 out of 100?

We've had cellular phones for what, about thirty years now? My old blackberry and my friend's iPhone 4 are both on AT&T, both in the same neighborhood of the same city (Chicago). I don't remember the last time I lost a call when I wasn't driving the underground on Lower Wacker Drive. He complains about dropped calls regularly. Neither of us has a case or bumpers or black electrician's tape wrapped around our phones.

Please tell me, what motivates a person to staunchly defend a corporation against any and all criticism?

Re:Steve and his FUD

[LBArrettAnderson]

No, we're talking about whether or not ~1.4% is a reasonably accurate number. Does your experience with dropped calls tell you it's much higher or lower than this? The number is certainly somewhere between 0% and 5% (you'd have to be insane to refute that range), which still means that what most people understood by Steve's statement (only 1% more dropped calls than the 3GS) is way off. If Steve were to get up and say that the iPhone 4 drops 20% more calls than the 3GS (based on the ridiculously high 5% number), what do you think people would have thought?

Re:Steve and his FUD

[Anonymous Coward]

If Jobs would lie to Woz and steal money from him (his best friend) why don't you think he would lie to you?

Re:Steve and his FUD

[Anonymous Coward]

you're good at your game too: he can't give out ATT's absolute number? Then the natural thing is to give out the relative number. (For example: 15% more). Instead, he does something really interesting: he gives out a delta where we don't know the order of magnitude to the underlying number. Nobody does this. (The change is an additional one per hundred, but I won't tell you compared to what). Would you be happy if Yoplait said the batches of yogurt you've been eating actually only contain less than one part per hundred more mercury than the ones you ate until last month? So while there is an increase... No?

See, what Steve did was give you neither the absolute nor the relative number.

Re:Steve and his FUD

[gilesjuk]

He said 1, less than one. Watch it again.

Re:Steve and his FUD

[Anonymous Coward]

Speaking of FUD, let's call every scandal gate! Yes, we could call this scandal Gategate!

Re:Steve and his FUD

[Wingsy]

My personal experience tells me it is much much higher than 1.4%. But we (or at least I) aren't talking about my experience or yours. It's the log that ATT maintains that tells them the number of dropped calls throughout iPhoneLand. The log shows that iP4s drops calls at less than 1% greater rate than the 3GS. And when I'm given hard numbers like that, even from a CEO, I tend to believe them rather than not. I'm not gullible, but I don't wear tin foil either.

Re:Steve and his FUD

[pspahn]

Jobs doesn't have friends. He only has subjects.

Re:Steve and his FUD

[Grieviant]

Why on earth is this guy getting modded up for posts like this? Yea, the internet actually can be a trusty source when the alternative is the ramblings of someone who has every interest in deliberately misleading consumers into believing there's nothing wrong with his product.

Re:Steve and his FUD

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.engadget.com/2010/01/28/atandt-says-its-closing-the-gap-on-dropped-calls/

Those slides look pretty official to me. Apparently it may only be about 1% nowadays, which would mean a 100% increase if the 3GS is more or less average.

Re:Steve and his FUD

[Anonymous Coward]

He said "less than 1 per 100". That's between 0 and 1. ;)

Re:Steve and his FUD

[Wingsy]

If I chose not to believe someone just because they had a motive to lie, I would chose to not believe your statement that the net can be a trusty source.

Re:Steve and his FUD

[LodCrappo]

If he was not allowed to give a critical element of the statistic, he should simply not have used that point at all.
instead, he tried to use half of a statistic to imply something that it doesn't actually mean.
shady business.

Re:Steve and his FUD

[Wingsy]

I believe the part that is confidential is the dropped call rate per a specific phone model, not the overall rate.

Re:Steve and his FUD

[Anonymous Coward]

Would you be happy if Yoplait said the batches of yogurt you've been eating actually only contain less than one part per hundred more mercury than the ones you ate until last month? So while there is an increase... No?

One part per hundred is deadly, one part per million is not though.

Re:Steve and his FUD

[Concerned Onlooker]

Except this isn't a scandal. It is a relatively minor technical glitch.

Re:Steve and his FUD

[Drew M.]

What about the average 30% iphone (2g-3g) dropped call rate in NY?
http://gizmodo.com/5370493/apple-genius-bar-iphones-30-percent-call-drop-is-normal-in-new-york

I would assume that iphones would have a higher drop rate than most other phones. But yes, your numbers could be dead on and are pretty disturbing.

Re:Steve and his FUD

[Anonymous Coward]

As a Canadian, it amuses me to see Americans tolerate even 0.1% dropped calls. AT&T has a crappy network, period.

Re:Steve and his FUD

[budfields]

You're good at magically rounding 1% up to 1%, also, and at quoting data you don't really have (general ATT call drops vs. the specific call drop rate of the 3GS, which is a different number).

Re:Steve and his FUD

[Anonymous Coward]

So here's the thing. If you bought it and don't like it...RETURN IT you morons? Why waste your life discussing it? God! Everyone is freaking out when all they have to do is walk BACK to the store, hand it over and say, "Cancel my contract and refund my money." It's in EVERY cell contract in the world and don't bother saying it isn't because THAT has been publicized a million times too.
Get a life, losers. Its a freakin' phone not the Apocalypse.

Re:Steve and his FUD

[JxcelDolghmQ]

Fuck AT&T... in the ass... with a chainsaw... smeared in rotten feces.

Re:Steve and his FUD

[jc42]

Let's say you had no phone service one day out of 100. Would that be acceptable to you?

Probably. A quick scan of my cell's log shows that there's roughly a 60% probability that I wouldn't notice, because I didn't make or receive a call that day. ;-)

Actually, I'd notice more if the "data" service were out for a full day. I use my cell phone's browser, email and google maps apps nearly every day. But those don't involve "phone" service.

It's funny how easy it is to use statistics and probabilities in a way that's misleading to most readers.

Re:Steve and his FUD

[Gnavpot]

The log shows that iP4s drops calls at less than 1% greater rate than the 3GS. And when I'm given hard numbers like that, even from a CEO, I tend to believe them rather than not.

The whole point which you seem to miss, is that you are not given this number by the CEO. You are given another number, carefully spinned to make you think you heard the number you claim to have heard.

Please understand the difference between:
1. One more missed call per 100 calls.
2. 1% more dropped calls.

If the usual rate of dropped calls is 2%, just to take an example, #1 is actually 50 times worse than #2. #1 means that the rate is increased by 1 percentage point to 3%. #2 means that the rate is increased by 0.02 percentage point to 2.02%.

Re:Steve and his FUD

[thegarbz]

Yes, Mr. Jobs, "Antennagate" is real.

NO Just plain and simply NO. I stood by and watched watergate happen and didn't think much about it. When people started talking about climategate I whinced, but Antennagate? It's not funny, it's not witty, it's not original, heck it doesn't even fit with the original use as a suffix for a political scandal.

I hereby suggest that everybody who is caught using "gate" as a suffix is made to go outside on a sunny day, to be pommeled into the ground by the awesome force of photons, or to just get a tan ruining the geek cred of slashdot users forever.

Re:Steve and his FUD

[VGPowerlord]

Actually, I'd notice more if the "data" service were out for a full day. I use my cell phone's browser, email and google maps apps nearly every day. But those don't involve "phone" service.

If you're talking about 3G data service, yes it does. It may not be a call, but it's still done using the cell network, meaning that you get a dropped connection instead.

Yes, there would be a difference in how it's measured, but I know I'd be ticked off if I was downloading a large file from somewhere that doesn't support resume and my connection died. Particularly if this phenomenon happened multiple times a day.

Re:Steve and his FUD

[Gnavpot]

And once again, I should have used preview. Everything after the first paragraph is my text, even though it appears as a second level quote.

Re:Steve and his FUD

[masmullin]

Public: Why the bad antenna Steve? Aren't we friends?

Steve Jobs:I ain't got no motherfucking friends. That's why I fucked your bitch you fat motherfucker {Take Money} West Side. Bad Boy Killers {Take Money}. You know who the realist is. $%^&*# we bring it to {Take Money} (ha ha, that's alright)

Re:Steve and his FUD

[Gnavpot]

He said "less than 1 per 100". That's between 0 and 1. ;)

Well, yes - if you are naive enough to believe that he would also have said "less than 1 per 100" if the rate was 0,1%.

Re:Steve and his FUD

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn right!

Now let's talk about how you CAN'T return/get a refund for Windows on 90%+ of the computers sold world-wide.

Re:Steve and his FUD

[Anonymous Coward]

I do love when they say most people have not noticed the issue because AT&T drops calls all the time or that most people do not talk on their I-phone.

I have changed my mind to switching over to AT&T from T-Mobile.

Re:Steve and his FUD

[Jay L]

I can see why AT&T would want the overall dropped-call rate to be confidential (it tells their competitors how they stand in call quality), but if they don't, why would AT&T then care about the rate for a specific phone?

Re:Steve and his FUD

[masmullin]

The expectations of data QoS are much lower than voice QoS (unless of course your VoIP), especially on a mobile phone. You ARENT going to be downloading a large file on a cell phone unless you are doing it over a 'corporate' account. And even so, you implicitly understand that cellular data is subject to problems. In the case of voice tolerance from a low QoS is very low. When people are talking to each other, they expect to have 100% up-time. ANY dropped calls are unacceptable.

Re:Steve and his FUD

[rfuilrez]

If the usual rate of dropped calls is 2%, just to take an example, #1 is actually 50 times worse than #2. #1 means that the rate is increased by 1

50% worse is not the same as 50 times worse.

Re:Steve and his FUD

[masmullin]

OMG its Scandalgate!

Re:Steve and his FUD

[tolan-b]

This reminds me of the statistics the UK government used to sell the smoking ban. They said that passive smoking caused a 20% increase in the risk of lung cancer. Which is true. What they didn't mention was that for a non-smoker the risk is about 1 in 1000. So a passive smoker (living with a 40 a day smoker for 20 years) has their risk of lung cancer increase from around 1 in 1000 to around 1.2 in 1000. Obviously this plays off the understanding that a regular smoker has an enormously higher risk (I forget the exact amount but it's higher that 1 in 10 I believe).

Re:Steve and his FUD

[santiagodraco]

Yeah, Steve is beyond lying for personal and professional gain.

I mean he came clean about the antenna problem right from the start when he said "you are holding it wrong" and "there's no problem, this is being blown all out of proportion".

Or when he stated so truthfully that the problem was with the ATT algorithm for calculating bars - because he needed us to see the truth - that inaccurate bars are the cause of dropped calls... oops!

Yeah, Stevie boy is beyond such base things like lying. Of course it's amazing what truth means when you are living in a self made fantasy world where, by the definition of your reality, everyone other than yourself are all ignorant peasants and therefore wrong by definition.

Re:Steve and his FUD

[Anonymous Coward]

In the UK, I have never had a dropped call while stationary. This is on O2, which is the worst network out of all five we have. The only time I have had calls dropped is when doing 120MPH on the train or 80MPH in the car.

When I'm in the USA, even in suburbs, AT&T drops calls on me now and then. It's an AT&T problem IMHO. I even get drop calls on my Nokia. Makes me want to throw the phones at a brick wall sometimes.

Re:Steve and his FUD

[masmullin]

I hereby dub your post "whinergate"

Re:Steve and his FUD

[squiggleslash]

It's worth adding:

1. These figures don't necessarily show that users with certain calling patterns will suffer drops more than others, very few people will have "exactly" "slightly less than one call per 100" dropped. Therefore, for many users you'll never see a call dropped, and for a sizable minority, you'll see call drops rise from, say, 10% to 20%. If the call drop rate doubles, obviously those who live in areas with great reception who make calls at times of low network usage (Code Division Multiple Access has a somewhat unpleasant characteristic called "breathing" where congestion physically shrinks the coverage area of each cell, and if you're making a 3G call, you're using Code Division Multiple Access) will not notice anything. Heavier users, who use the phone at peak times, and who aren't fortunate enough to be near a tower, are going to find a doubling intolerable.
2. The figure is probably accurate for call drops caused by the change in antenna design, but are two causes of call drops, and the antenna one is the one everyone's focused on. Essentially there's an issue with the proximity sensor that's causing people to brush against the hang-up button just because the phone is held up to their faces. The AT&T figures aren't going to measure that - the network will see an explicit hang-up message from the handset and not measure it as a dropped call. The good news is this one, supposedly, can be fixed in software.

I thought Jobs hit quite a few duff notes yesterday, both with criticisms of their competitors ("But Mom! They're doing it too!") and the suggestion it wasn't a real problem with some fairly bad manipulation of the statistics ("Who cares? I only hit him a little bit...") I'll be glad when that stupid RDF thing disappears, and Apple has to make great stuff again.

Re:Steve and his FUD

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple says the iPhone 4 drops one more call per 100 calls. So only 1%. No big deal. But Stevie left something out. How many calls are dropped per 100? He's good at this game; he didn't say. AT&T claims their dropped call rate is 1.4%. 1.4% + 1% is 2.4%. That's a 70% increase. 70% is quite a bit, especially when the antenna is supposed to be better than the previous generation. Yes, Mr. Jobs, "Antennagate" is real.

I'm from EU, and what is this thing "drop rate" everyone is talking about?
Amazing how you people put up with such a poor service.

Re:Steve and his FUD

[markxz]

For my VoIP system, Skype, I do not have any dropped calls, of course its not cellular either.

That would depend on your connection to Skype. Also in the UK mobile network "three" offers free Skype to Skype calls which are transmitted over the mobile network as voice, not as data.

Re:Steve and his FUD

[kevingolding2001]

50% worse is 50 times 1% worse, which is what gp was referring to by "#2" (and presumably what his Royal Steveiness was hoping people would misinterpret his statement as.)

Re:Steve and his FUD

[Khyber]

Sadly, that might cure the problem they have up their ass. Y'know, with all that new research into fecal transplants and all.

Re:Steve and his FUD

[kevingolding2001]

I'm waiting for some political scandal to surface that somehow involves an actual gate (maybe a property boundary access dispute or something). All the commentators harping on about 'gategate' should be worth a few laughs.

Re:Steve and his FUD

[tyrione]

If Jobs would lie to Woz and steal money from him (his best friend) why don't you think he would lie to you?

That's why they're still friends and hold no animosity towards each other. Perhaps you weren't there at those touching reunions to verify and thus can't take Woz's word either.

Re:Steve and his FUD

[petermgreen]

the network will see an explicit hang-up message from the handset and not measure it as a dropped call.
This will also happen on those calls where the call is not actually dropped but is degraded to the point where the the participants give up on it as a means of communication.

Re:Steve and his FUD

[salesgeek]

No, it's a defective product.

Re:Steve and his FUD

[yeshuawatso]

The first Jobs to 2Pac reference. Funny.

Re:Steve and his FUD

[Grieviant]

You're trolling, right? The heart of the issue has already been explained even if you still fail to accept it - the increase in dropped calls was explained by Jobs in a way that would be favourably misinterpreted as a tiny difference. In reality, the available information (from, GASP, the INTERNET) would suggest it has nearly doubled.

I wonder, whose motivation do you think is stronger to distort the truth in this situation - random slashdot posters who couldn't really give a toss about Apple, or a CEO in the process of damage control because his company's reputation is taking a beating? That's irrelevant since his claims have already been exposed as misleading. If he wasn't allowed to provide any meaningful stats on the issue, why do you suppose he went down that road anyway?

Re:Steve and his FUD

[Jettamann]

The best use of Tupac (Hip Hop) Lyrics ever!

Re:Steve and his FUD

[Jeremy Erwin]

Nowadays, the third rate burglary and the ensuing conspiracy would probably be called Watergate-gate.

Re:Steve and his FUD

[sjwt]

I certainly believe nokia's claim..

"antenna performance over physical design if they are ever in conflict."

Re:Steve and his FUD

[Anonymous Coward]

I think Jobs used the right number. I think the number of additional dropped calls per 100 is what I want to know as a user.

Consider two phones A and B. Now each phone has a new version. Phone A has a dropped call rate of 1.4%. The new phone A drops one more call per 100 which means a 70% increase as you point out. Phone B has a dropped call rate of 20%, i.e. 20 calls per 100. The new phone B has an increase of 1 dropped call per 100 means 21 dropped calls, an increase of 5%. Personally, I would rather have the phone
with the 70% increase in dropped calls, since the total number of dropped calls is lower.

Re:Steve and his FUD

[daver00]

Fact 3: 0.55% of users who call Apple care have complained about bad reception.

The lie: Omitting any mention of how many users have called Apple care for hardware problems vs other. If 1% of Apple care calls are for hardware complaints then over half of those calls are for reception issues. If its 50%, then not so much. But then my guess is if it was 50%, we would have heard about it.

Re:Steve and his FUD

[daver00]

But anecdotally at least, we know that iPhone 3gs has a poor track record for dropped calls, so if the average is 1.4%, its probably safe to say the 3gs is at ~2%.

Re:Steve and his FUD

[Bing Tsher E]

All that demonstrates is what a gracious and forgiving sort of man Steve Wozniak is. It says almost noting at all about Steve Jobs character.

Re:Steve and his FUD

[Anonymous Coward]

to be fair, when parsing Job's exact language you should remember he said "less than 1 out of 100 more". So it could be far less than 1%.

The declaration it's real ignores the original analysis, which found the iphone 4 is better at not dropping calls in low signal areas than the iphone 3gs.

Re:Steve and his FUD

[SETIGuy]

It would also be "more than three times as many as the 3GS"

Re:Steve and his FUD

[Anonymous Coward]

I highly doubt it's under 0.9%, or Jobs would have said the exact number. He's a master of marketing to gullible idiots.

Re:Steve and his FUD

[LBArrettAnderson]

The number he gave was entirely useless without knowing the actual drop rate. Remember that what he was trying to do is vindicate the *antenna,* which means that he was comparing to other phones, not overall drop rates.

Re:Steve and his FUD

[dafing]

I agree about "never having dropped calls", here in NZ 97% (quoted) of the country is covered, we rarely make phone calls, but I've never heard of a "dropped call" before. Certainly nothing like in the USA , where comments mention not being able to use their phones in their own house....or only in ONE SPOT on their property!

Of course this doesnt excuse any problems the iPhone 4 IS or IS NOT having, but its worth considering, outside of that one country, does anyone really have any problems with cellphones?

Re:Steve and his FUD

[Macman408]

Luckily, I tend to not make millions of calls myself, so the absolute number doesn't really make a difference for me - how about you?

Re:Steve and his FUD

[drolli]

No. dropping one call per hundred without going trough a tunnel/being of the basement of a building or behind a mountain is *not* acceptable. And this even includes the fact that people who have the habit oh holding the phone in a certain way have a higher drop rate, while a large part will be fine. And no, its even more unacceptable that 10% of the customers should have a 10% drop rate. This is a joke.

All of my phones (mainly Nokias) had consistent displays of the signal strength - i even observe the display is pessimistic, that is *if* the lowest bar is visible its ok. None of them dropped a call without a good cause (read as: battery empty, me walking in a shielded room in the lab, going underground on a train), being in a large steel-concrete building which is not well covered (mountain area, signal already weak).

So no, a drop rate between 1% and 10% is completely ridiculous. Try to sell this to somebody who talks regularly to customers by phone or has a lot of calls....

And the solution is insulting. If they know that building a phone which such a design yields an unreliable device, then they should not use that design. end of the story.

Re:Steve and his FUD

[Macman408]

If that were literally true, every Nokia user would be carrying around an auto-aiming parabolic antenna 6 feet in diameter and a few hundred pounds of batteries to power the amplifiers for it.

I get what he's trying to communicate - that he believes that choices between aesthetics and performance will be decided in favor of performance. But only within certain constraints. Like a certain sized device, with a certain amount of talk and standby time, in a particular shape, with particular durability requirements, some maximum cost of parts and engineering, etc...

Apple's not really any different, they just have additional constraints; eg longer battery life and smaller size than the previous generation, while boosting the screen resolution and the size of the camera lens and sensor.

Re:Steve and his FUD

[Maxo-Texas]

My dropped and missed calls rate is much higher than 1.4%.

There's a reason for this. I work on the 5th floor of a two building complex on the inside of the complex. While my bars sometimes go to 5 bars, they also drop to zero bars frequently. As a novice, I have no clue why it can vary so dramatically but if I go down to the first floor on the other end of the building, the signal locks at 3 bars and I get reliable calls.

AT&T is my carrier.

Re:Steve and his FUD

[Anonymous Coward]

o2 in Germany also allows us to use their data plans for VoIP communication.

Re:Steve and his FUD

[sjwt]

Physical size, Screen size,Battery life, Camera lense are items every company trys to reduce/incress where they can, this is not somthing Apple invented.

Geting a better placmnet for the Antenna helps leads to better battery life, if your phone is low on bars, it will spend energy trying to find a better transmitter.

I recently moved from an area with 2-3 bars, into a full bar area, and I get an extra 3-4 days out of my phone now.

Re:Steve and his FUD

[Wingsy]

I see what you're saying and agree with you. Even though I did say "1% greater rate", Jobs said "1 per 100 calls". And I know that 1 in a hundred is 1% so whatever the rate of the 3GS is, the iP4 is 1% greater. That's not double-talk... :) I mean if the 3GS was 2%, the iP4 is 3%. So you could say 50% greater, but still, 1 more call per 100 isn't a whole lot. Reminds me of how early iPhone sales (and for that matter, Android) had figures of "200% increase in sales!" which sounds impressive but the low starting point was never mentioned - like sales went from 5000 to 15000 or some such.

Anyway, My experience is that it drops 100 calls more per 100 calls than the 3GS, since all 3 of my 3GS phones are rock solid here at my house but my 3 iP4s (since returned) would lose connection when held gently in the same way I've always held the 3GS (and 3G before that). Every time. And demonstrated to Apple. I could easily fix it with a case but I don't like cases and I don't want to change the way I hold it, so I returned all 3 of them and went back to my original contract and my 3GSs. Wife had the same problem (no bumper). Daughter did not, until she removed her case. The iP4 is a great smartphone. Excellent camera, video, responsive, awesome display, intuitive to use (like all iPhones), FaceTime is fantastic, and on and on. It just has that one spot that you cannot touch when in a weak signal area (like my home), and that one spot is where I naturally touch it, and could not train myself to continuously be aware not to. My dropped call rate no doubt drove up the number of dropped calls per 100 for the iP4, but there are many many more people out there who say they have no problem at all with reception. Personally, I've met 3 other iP4 owners and have asked them if they have experienced any dropped calls when touching the antenna gap. All 3 said no and were puzzled about all the talk about it. Makes me think that the unlucky people who have the problem have it bad, and those that don't, don't.

So, how can I say "1% greater" and make it mean "add" rather than "multiply"?

Re:Steve and his FUD

[Anonymous Coward]

But the funny thing is, not everyone is talking about it, or puts up with it.

I'm on T-mobile, and have never had dropped call problems except in a deep sub-basement at work (unfortunately where my office was, LOL), or WAY out in the boonies (which you guys have a few less of, right?).

My parents have Centennial, a regional operator, and have no trouble anywhere in the boonies (and don't work in a dungeon).

I know guys with Sprint and Verizon, they don't have problems, or if they do they never talk about them.

It's an AT&T problem, commonly blamed on the iPhone, which apparently was the first clue most people had that mobile data existed, much less that they could use it. But AT&T was honestly pretty sucky before the iPhone launched, and it appears that, even after they had the exclusivity deal on the iPhone, they didn't upgrade their network to handle it, just as they'd been not upgrading their network ever since they bought it in the form of Cingular.

So AT&T sucks, drops everyone's calls from time to time. The iPhone now has an additional call-dropping issue due to its exposed antenna, and the fact that it's on the suckiest network isn't helping -- and hey, the hundreds of phones and dozen or so carriers that don't have a "drop rate" to speak of just aren't news. But don't think the rest of us aren't as bemused as you by what the average iPhone/AT&T customer is putting up with.

Re:Steve and his FUD

[BitZtream]

You're just trying to come up with retarded ways to make the numbers look worse than they really are. 1 more call per 100 is still 1 out of 100 extra, or 1 percent. It may be up to double the previous rate, but thats where it ends and making the comparison in that context just shows your going way out of your way to make it look worse than it is.

If it went from 0 to 1 call per 100 or it went from 98 to 99 per 100, its a change you aren't going to notice without tracking every call you make anyway on a spreadsheet or something.

You are just trying to be deceptive to further your point, which is a lame one.

The antenna IS better than the previous one, there is plenty of tests from Apple, and unrelated 3rd parties showing that.

Antennagate is only 'real' because people like yourselves are idiots. Just get over your jealous and go buy one instead of spending your days trying to figure out how to pick things to knock it on.

No one who owns an iPhone gives a fuck about your whining about the Antenna problems they don't have. No one that owns one gives a shit about what others are writing about a non-existent problem.

In short, if it were REALLY a problem they'd have higher returns, especially since its been sensationalized by idiots such as yourself.

Is the Antenna lacking in several ways. That is indeed a fact. It is better than most other internal antenna only phones however, so ranting over it is just retarded.

If you want to talk about FUD perhaps you should look in the mirror and stop distorting numbers well beyond any reasonable interpretation just to further your nearly non-existent point.

100s of legitimate reasons to knock the iPhone and the best you can come up with is this? You guys have to be some of the most pathetic trolls ever.

Re:Steve and his FUD

[Phoghat]

Piss and moan, whine, whine. The damn "problem" can be fixed with a Lance Armstrong "Live Strong" $1 rubber band or anything similar.

http://www.techeye.net/mobile/how-to-fix-a-broken-iphone-4-with-a-rubber-band

Now STFU about this non-issue and get back to meaningful dialog.

Re:Steve and his FUD

[zdzichu]

Meantime, the rest of the world doesn't know what "dropped call" is. It only happens in extreme situations (New Year's Eve celebration, nationwide disasters etc.). Of course one can argue that "quality" of US cell networks is nationwide disaster.

Re:Steve and his FUD

[Lars T.]

First of all, he said nothing about 1%, he said "less than 1 out of 100 calls more" compared to thee number of dropped calls compared to the 3GS. Which also means no human would be able to tell the difference without either actually counting the drops over several hundred calls, or the number of dropped calls per 100 of the iPhone 3GS either being

• 0 (or at least very much under 1 per 100), so the user of an iPhone 4 would actually experience dropped calls when he didn't before, or
• 99 (or very close), so that the user would get absolutely no undropped calls anymore.

Because, if you haven't noticed, 1.4% is the rate for all>/I> models of all manufacturers, and there are obviously quite large differences between them - else nobody would have ever complained or praised his new phone for there being more/less dropped call under the same circumstances.

Re:Steve and his FUD

[jo_ham]

That might be a decent claim if "random slashdot posters" really "don't give a crap about Apple".

I think it is clear that there are many who really do, and not in a positive way.

Of course Jobs is going to present the best case scenario and figures (without actually lying) - that is how statistics work. Everyone does it. A counter example to Apple doing it is the often repeated story about how "android is outselling iPhone" while conveniently leaving out crucial details like a small sampling window of time, and a 2 for 1 deal on droids and the upcoming release of the iPhone 4 occurring in that slot. So, while true, it really needs a disclaimer.

Palin did it with the polar bear population figures, claiming they had doubled. Great, but they were tiny to start with, and it's not evidence that the environment has recovered enough for you to drill for oil up there with no regard for the ecosystem.

The UK government did it with the smoking ban - passive smoking increases your risk of lung cancer by 20%, but the chance of a non-smoker getting it in the first place is so small, that the literal value odds only increased by a tiny amount.

Anyone with a strong bias about a particular product or organisation is going to distort the truth for their own ends, and slashdot is a long, long way wide of a dispassionate observer of Apple (in both directions from neutral).

They were damned either way with this press conference - there is obviously a problem (perhaps several problems, including the software stuff), and not saying anything would raise calls of them just ignoring it (regardless of what they were doing behind the scenes). Apple has been bitten by that one before by keeping silent until it was ready with a fix for a broken product. If they come out and hold a press conference then they are in the situation they are now, with people pouring over every word looking for something to use against them. It is a total no brainer that Steve would present the stats in as positive a light as possible, and there were some he could not release at all (due to AT&T's policies).

In the meantime they will presumably fix the phone's design flaw.

Re:Steve and his FUD

[xouumalperxe]

AT&T claims their dropped call rate is 1.4%. 1.4% + 1% is 2.4%. That's a 70% increase. 70% is quite a bit

If you want to twist numbers to suit your needs, we can try something else as well: 1.4% dropped calls implies 98.6% successful calls, or 97.6% for the iPhone 4. That's only a 1.01% decrease in the success rate. If it's not obvious why your way of describing the situation is flawed, look at the extreme case of 98% failure rate, you'd say 1% would only amount to a tiny difference (just over 1%!) in failure rate, while I'd say that 99% failure rate means only half as many calls go through.

(Full disclosure: I'm a mac user, on the market for a smartphone, probably getting a Desire though)

Re:Steve and his FUD

[Laglorden]

The lie: 0.55% of users with cases that Apple _registers_ av "antenna problems". They might have had tousands of calls which they simply don't count or labels as, I don't know, user errors ;)

"User held the phone in the wrong hand! -> user error, not "antenna problem" since Jobs said "there is no antenna problem"

Tadaa, nice statistics!

Re:Steve and his FUD

[Anonymous Coward]

I bet most people think you're serious.

But I know better. Thanks for parodying the "Mac defender" stereotype. +1 Funny.

Re:Steve and his FUD

[Anonymous Coward]

Statistics 101, could be hard for CEOs...
He need to say, it was NOT Apple V4 drop the call, it was other guy phone drop the call; therefore, you lost the connection!!! .....
Apple: The secret to success is knowing who to blame for your failures.
(despair.com)

Re:Steve and his FUD

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple says the iPhone 4 drops one more call per 100 calls. So only 1%. No big deal. But Stevie left something out. How many calls are dropped per 100? He's good at this game; he didn't say. AT&T claims their dropped call rate is 1.4%. 1.4% + 1% is 2.4%. That's a 70% increase. 70% is quite a bit, especially when the antenna is supposed to be better than the previous generation. Yes, Mr. Jobs, "Antennagate" is real.

Wow... Math has gone in the dumpster, somewhere out back with our ability to communicate.

1 more call per 100 _dropped_ calls (not per 100 calls; very different meaning...) This is a proportional increase of 1%, not 70% (an not 71.42_% either)

that is 1.01 * 1.4% or 1.01 * .014 = 0.01414 or 1.414 %... an increase in to the overall drop rate of 1.4% that is about .014%... or 101 dropped calls, where the 3Gs had 100 dropped calls. (Actually, they said it was less than 1 additional call drop, but that's not the point of my math tirade.)

Anyone else not see the math duh?

Granted, we have no evidence since "AT&T doesn't want to give out those numbers". Therefore, we base our math on someone's claim that AT&T drops 1.4% of iPhone calls (all or just the 3GS, the claimed comparison...)

The only real tell will be the number of folks who were "waiting for Apple to issue a fix, before complaining or returning the phone." That will be illustrative, but likely never published. Also, 3 weeks isn't much time, generally.

Re:Steve and his FUD

[Anonymous Coward]

You fanboys are amazing. Nothing is ever Apple's fault, it's always AT&T, the RIAA, Nokia, Microsoft, the FTC, or some other party's blame for all of Apple's actions.

Re:Steve and his FUD

[Macman408]

They didn't invent those things, and I'm not saying they did. However, they DID invent the previous generation phone, which provides a baseline that they have to beat. This is especially true since they really only have one model of iPhone at a time. Other phone manufacturers have so many models that you don't have to beat the specs of every previous phone, or even of any particular phone, because nobody is making that comparison.

And if you measure your phone's battery life in days, you either don't have a smartphone, or you have one that you really don't need.

Re:Steve and his FUD

[makomk]

True. In this case - and it's quite unusual for it to be the case - the relative increase is probably more useful though. 1 in 100 is the figure for all users, but there's going to be a lot of individual variation. Some people are going to spend most of their time in strong signal areas and have hardly any problem, whereas others live in areas with poor reception and drop many calls. The relative increase should give them a more useful idea of what to expect.

Re:Steve and his FUD

[MogNuts]

Totally spot on. And this time I just don't get. I can't understand all the people defending the piece of garbage that is Iphone 4 and iOS4.

Take a step back for a second past the fact that the Iphone has massive design defects and quite frankly is one of the worst phones to ever be released (how can you say a phone which can't make calls be a good phone?) How many actually use your smartphone? I get texts, e-mails, IM's, etc. I have a 3GS. I get bombarded 24x7 with alerts that interrupt me and won't go away until I touch a button. People hate pop-ups, but when iOS gives them, they "love their Apple experience." Anyway, this gets real annoying for someone who actually uses their phone and gets more than 1 IM, e-mail, etc., and doesn't spend their day jerking off to playing a piano on his Iphone. Meanwhile, Android and Blackberry have a nice little non-intrusive alert. Android even elegantly sorts a drop-down box if you would like to see items at a glance. And it doesn't interrupt what I'm doing.

And don't get me started on multitasking. IOS has limited multitasking and the programmer has to enable it. This reminds me of back in the day when shit-brained Apple still had cooperative multi-tasking while the entire world was on true pre-emptive multitasking. Apple left it to the coders to do multitasking. Look at how well that worked out back then. Most coders are not that good, and as we see from the App Store (don't get me started on that one--95% are a buggy featureless mess), most of those developers are downright awful. Presently, thousands of apps now handle multitasking like garbage. And history repeats itself.

I only got the 3GS because I wanted a change at the time. I used Blackberries for years (which I absolutely loved; the Bold 9700 is quite possible the best phone in existence for people who actually use their phone, and don't play games or need 10,000 fart/flashlight apps), but I just felt like eating chicken instead of steak. I regret ever being duped by the hype ("but-but-Apple gives the best experience") and believing that Apple actually made a good product.

Mod me down. Argue with me until you're blue in the face. I don't really care what morons think. For the rest of us, who actually want a superior product, stick with RIM and Google people.

Re:Steve and his FUD

[Anonymous Coward]

Why doesn't he just augment the software on the iPhones to collect these statistics themselves and upload them to AppleHQ when they get a chance?

Re:Steve and his FUD

[MogNuts]

Forgive me. That last paragraph was meant for all those who will almost 100% decide to flame me because I knocked their precious deity, Apple. It wasn't directed to you. You are spot on and correct.

Re:Steve and his FUD

[awyeah]

Your assumption would be right. I went from a BlackBerry Bold (on AT&T 3G) to an iPhone 3GS. I didn't change any habits, and I drop more calls on the iPhone. Not a lot more, but I almost never dropped calls on the BlackBerry.

If call reliability were my highest priority, I would have returned the iPhone.

Re:Steve and his FUD

[sjwt]

I have a Nokia e90, dependingon work useage, I can get 8-12days, as aposed to the 5-7 I used to get.

Re:Steve and his FUD

[DoChEx]

The point of Antennagate is spin, to try and include all smartphones that had a demonstrable antenna problem into the same category thereby removing Apple from the spotlight and the story; moving the focus to a more general antenna issue. They're now trying to gain control over the propaganda war and the publics' perception of the problem. Even using '-gate' is part of it, it's such a cliché, it give the whole thing a more boring appearance, since everything these days now end's in '-gate'.

The problem is people want Apple's blood for some reason???

Re:Steve and his FUD

[AmiMoJo]

How about the number of calls people hung up on because they couldn't hear the other person properly? When the call starts getting choppy and breaks up a lot of people end it and call back later. It looks to AT&T like they just finished the call but in reality it was due to a poor signal.

You know what they say. Lies, damned lies and statistics.

Re:Steve and his FUD

[AmiMoJo]

Well all I know is I can go out and come home not smelling like an ash tray. If I am at less risk of getting cancer too that's a bonus.

I would certainly never have accepted any work in a smoking environment.

Re:Steve and his FUD

[thegarbz]

For some reason? Here's an analogy:

You're at a pool party, Microsoft, Nokia and Apple all showed up. After a few beers Microsoft runs up and says "Hey everybody I can walk on water", jumps into the pool and sinks. Everyone gets a good laugh, and tells em to go back to rooting customers in the back room.

So in the mean time while nobody is looking Nokia goes out and puts a plank in the water and sees if they can walk accross without anyone noticing. They do, so they go again and this time fall into the water. No one thought twice about it because quite frankly we're all too busy getting drunk and Nokia didn't exactly make too much fanfare about it.

Suddenly God appears (Steve Jobs). He starts preaching about the second coming of Christ. He demands everyone bow down to the almighty Apple running around in it's stainless steel underpants. Apple is going around the party telling everyone how he's top shit and can do anything. He runs up to the pool and falls into the water because he didn't realise there was no plank to support his walking on water illusion. Naturally the entire party goes wild. "Apple you wanker". "He look everyone Christ isn't that good afterall" [hahahaha]

I couldn't tell you which smart phones are on the market. I know Nokia has an N900 which people think kinda highly off, and I know other companies make them. Yet Slashdot has devoted several stories per week to Apple's new iPhone 4 pre release glorifying it on some utterly ridiculous pedestal. Are you quite honestly surprised that when it they fall off their increidbly high horse that they land quite hard, and it hurts?

Wanting Apple's blood is a natural balance to the force. Nokia may have had their share of problems, but they don't release a product under incredible fanfare claiming it'll change the world, then telling users they don't know how to hold a phone when it doesn't work, and then somehow claiming that this is all a big software fault, but hey look at RIM they have problems too.

The media chase Apples blood because their action's (not their product) deserve it.

Re:Steve and his FUD

[tolan-b]

There are lots of grounds for a smoking ban, and I personally support it despite being a smoker. What annoys me is the misleading grounds on which it was sold to the public.

Re:Steve and his FUD

[tolan-b]

Yeah I agree. Originally Isaid "This reminds me of the statistics the UK government used to sell the smoking ban. Except in reverse." but the Android browser *hates* /. and I lost my post once. ;/

Re:Steve and his FUD

[Gnavpot]

So, how can I say "1% greater" and make it mean "add" rather than "multiply"?

By using the term "percentage point" (like I already did in the posting you replied to).

When something increases 50% from 2% to 3%, the increase is 1 percentage point.

Re:Steve and his FUD

[dwightk]

what if you are able to connect to more calls because of the supposedly better antenna? Maybe you are dropping calls you would previously never get.

Of course they did.

[AnonymousClown]

During that time, RIM has avoided designs like the one Apple used in the iPhone 4 and instead has used innovative designs which reduce the risk for dropped calls, especially in areas of lower coverage.

RIM's market are business people and others who really use their phone for calling, email, and other communications. They bought it to do a function.

People bought the iPhone because it was Apple and they wanted to have a stylish phone. They wanted to look marvelous.

If it wasn't the case, then why did the iPhone sell like hot cakes in markets where AT&T was known to have shitty service? Consumer Reports have been tracking that for years.

Re:Of course they did.

[frosty_tsm]

During that time, RIM has avoided designs like the one Apple used in the iPhone 4 and instead has used innovative designs which reduce the risk for dropped calls, especially in areas of lower coverage.

RIM's market are business people and others who really use their phone for calling, email, and other communications. They bought it to do a function.

People bought the iPhone because it was Apple and they wanted to have a stylish phone. They wanted to look marvelous.

If it wasn't the case, then why did the iPhone sell like hot cakes in markets where AT&T was known to have shitty service? Consumer Reports have been tracking that for years.

Having used both, I'll have to say that I like having an easy to use phone. The Blackberry that I use for work is crap in this department. An iPhone is more functional for non-work use (video, games, pictures).

I'm not saying that there are people who bought it to be stylish, but you're over-simplifying things.

Re:Of course they did.

[Anonymous Coward]

Having used both, I'll have to say that I like having an easy to use phone. The Blackberry that I use for work is crap in this department. An iPhone is more functional for non-work use (video, games, pictures).

I'm not saying that there are people who bought it to be stylish, but you're over-simplifying things.

Silly me, I thought the primary purpose was that it was a PHONE. That works. I don't care if the thing prints money while giving me blowjobs- if it doesn't make calls reliably, it isn't a phone.

Re:Of course they did.

[Man On Pink Corner]

People bought the iPhone because it was Apple and they wanted to have a stylish phone. They wanted to look marvelous.

Keep telling yourself that, Mr. Ballmer.

Re:Of course they did.

[Giometrix]

Well, these days for many people making phone calls is not #1 on their list for their portable devices (we call them cell phones for traditional reasons). Most of us don't want to carry around additional devices, so we appreciate modern cell phones that consolidate cell phone, pda and mp3 player into one device.

Still, it should always be function over form. Even if making calls isn't my #1 priority (which it isn't); when I DO make a call, I want it to not be dropped.

Re:Of course they did.

[Moridineas]

People bought the iPhone because it was Apple and they wanted to have a stylish phone. They wanted to look marvelous.

Way to stereotype.

I use my iPhone for work, full use of VPN and intranet apps, exchange access, group calendaring, etc. It works very well for me. As good as a blackberry for business? Perhaps not, but it's pretty close imho.

Let me put it this way--having used both, I don't see any compelling features of the Blackberry that would make me want to get one over an iPhone or an eg Android. Again very much IMHO, but I think RIM is going to be a big loser in the smartphone war. It wouldn't surprise me if Nokia is headed that way too. Maybe Apple is next for all I know...

Re:Of course they did.

[ratboy666]

Let's look at use cases. I am in the (fortunate) position to have an iPhone 3G (my wife's) and a BlackBerry 9000 (mine). The 9000 was chosen based on the keyboard size (over the Bold, etc.).

Phone Usage: BlackBerry. If we are in (say) a parking garage, we use my phone. The iPhone craps out much earlier (and we use the same carrier).

MP3 Playback: BlackBerry. You just plug the phone into a computer and drag the MP3s over. They play. Then again, I have an iPod as well. But, it doesn't really do so well -- the BB is also a "USB stick".

Video Playback: BlackBerry. See MP3 Playback. As well, the BlackBerry will just play Xvid encoded AVI files. Grab it and go. No need to transcode and put into iTunes first.

Instant Messaging: iPhone. The conversation threading is nice

Email: BlackBerry.

Bluetooth: BlackBerry. I can squirt pictures and stuff over to computers or other phones. Just not iPhones.

Storage: BlackBerry. Just a USB drive. Stick in a micro-sd to extend the storage.

Router: iPhone. I think (I haven't seen the feature on the 3G yet). As a road warrior I carry a micro-router along with my BlackBerry.

So, it depends on your use cases. It is interesting that the iPhone wins in a one "business" case (router) and one "home" case (instant messaging). As to "usable" it all depends... If you are a "road warrior", you may not have access to the computer that is the "home computer" that the iPhone depends on. Unless, of course, that is your laptop. (but, what if your laptop is stolen?) Which makes the iPhone pretty much a non-starter for a pure "smartphone" play.

Re:Of course they did.

[masmullin]

I don't care if the thing prints money while giving me blowjobs- if it doesn't make calls reliably

IDK. I think I could live with a few dropped calls if it printed me money and gave me "on demand" blowjobs... hell, it'd be rather "pimp" of it.

Re:Of course they did.

[santiagodraco]

Huh? Nice made up story.

Certainly people bought the phone for business. It's just ridiculous to imply otherwise. I know tons of people who bought the iPhone as a Blackberry replacement, and tons more who couldn't because their company did not support the iPhone (or allow it's use) at the time.

So nice attempt to somehow discredit RIMs statement. A statement that is very well said and puts Apple in a pretty shitty light, especially when you consider how badly Job's wants the corporate business. And they made acquiring that business SIGNIFICANTLY more difficult for themselves with both the iPhone 4 itself and the way they have handled it's problems.

Re:Of course they did.

[tyrione]

During that time, RIM has avoided designs like the one Apple used in the iPhone 4 and instead has used innovative designs which reduce the risk for dropped calls, especially in areas of lower coverage.

RIM's market are business people and others who really use their phone for calling, email, and other communications. They bought it to do a function.

People bought the iPhone because it was Apple and they wanted to have a stylish phone. They wanted to look marvelous.

If it wasn't the case, then why did the iPhone sell like hot cakes in markets where AT&T was known to have shitty service? Consumer Reports have been tracking that for years.

Yes, those business people surfing their stock portfolios, touching base with their frat brothers and texting their fellow day traders have serious work to do. The average person, no matter their job spends an awful large amount of time twiddling their thumbs on all brands of smart phones.

Re:Of course they did.

[mdarksbane]

I find it interesting that you ignore web browsing and third party apps, which are pretty much the biggest reasons to get an iphone. Browsing on my father in law's blackberry is *painful* compared to my touch. I won't argue with your specific win/loss analysis much, though (although I'd call mp3 playback a wash).

Re:Of course they did.

[Sycraft-fu]

Near as I can tell, people who say the iPhone is more "usable" mean it is more "shiny". It does have a friendly looking interface and you can just push the screen and have shit happen. However, in terms of actually making some real use of it, the Blackberry does just fine. They aren't so shiny, they are very much business targeted phones and it shows with things like the fact that they are all FIPS compliant (what home user gives a shit?). That doesn't mean they are hard to use or can't get shit done, on the contrary they are extremely capable. They are designed for mobile work, and in particular mobile e-mail.

I've found whenever someone gets an iPhone and starts gushing about the features, it is because they are coming from a normal phone. So they associate all the new shit with "iPhone" not "smatphone". I remember when a coworker got one (3G I think, maybe the one before that) and kept showing off all the stuff and all I could think is "My smartphone does that." He showed me nothing that my phone didn't also do. To him, it was the iPhone being amazing (he bought it because of looks, though he'd never admit it), to me it was someone discovering that smartphones are much more than simple phones.

Re:Of course they did.

[capebretonsux]

If it wasn't the case, then why did the iPhone sell like hot cakes in markets where AT&T was known to have shitty service?

Zynga made 100 million last year selling virtual goods. During a recession. 'Why' people would fork up their cash for something they know is faulty isn't based on sound reasoning. They buy it 'cause it's hot. They buy it because they had the previous generation or 'cause Android just doesn't appeal to them. They buy it 'cause its the next generation and they can't wait another 12 months for iphone 5. They're the Vista users of the phone world.

Re:Of course they did.

[dangitman]

Still, it should always be function over form

So, a phone that's the size of a loaf of bread is better than a phone that fits in your pocket if it is slightly more functional?

Re:Of course they did.

[MightyYar]

I thought the primary purpose was that it was a PHONE

Ask someone with teenagers... minutes aren't even an issue anymore - it's all texting, games, etc. The phone functions are definitely secondary to a large portion of users.

Re:Of course they did.

[Giometrix]

Still, it should always be function over form

So, a phone that's the size of a loaf of bread is better than a phone that fits in your pocket if it is slightly more functional?

No, but this is already a solved problem... I haven't had reception problems in years, and none of those phones were "slices of bread."

Re:Of course they did.

[MightyYar]

Near as I can tell, people who say the iPhone is more "usable" mean it is more "shiny".

Maybe what you say is more so recently, but when the iPhone first came out it was the only phone with an enjoyable internet browser. Sure, even my Sony Erickson flip phone can run Opera Mini, but it's pretty painful compared to Safari.

Personally, I think all smart phones are ooooo, shiny so I haven't made the plunge :)

Re:Of course they did.

[dangitman]

No, but this is already a solved problem... I haven't had reception problems in years,

But you said it should always be function over form. If you really meant this, then a bread-loaf-sized phone should always be preferred to a pocket-sized phone, even if it only gets 1 extra dBm of signal strength.

My point is that this is an over-simplistic fallacy. There are always trade-offs and compromises. Even the idea of "function" and "form" being separate is a fallacy. They are intertwined and dependent on one another. Why have laptops become more popular than desktop computers? It's because the form actually increases functionality.

I really don't understand why this simple concept is so widely misunderstood.

Re:Of course they did.

[LynnwoodRooster]

As good as a blackberry for business? Perhaps not, but it's pretty close imho.

Let me put it this way--having used both, I don't see any compelling features of the Blackberry that would make me want to get one over an iPhone

Well, you can hold the Blackberry and make a phone call, does that count?

Re:Of course they did.

[Anonymous Coward]

Having used both, I'll have to say that I like having an easy to use phone. The Blackberry that I use for work is crap in this department. An iPhone is more functional for non-work use (video, games, pictures).

I'm not saying that there are people who bought it to be stylish, but you're over-simplifying things.

I think that you're oversimplifying things a bit too. Managing mail and contacts is way easier on the BB than on the iPhone. Organizing and keeping track of information is way easier on my BB than iPhone. And sharing information? Between applications? Like..calendar info? Notes from one app to the next? Good luck with that.

Re:Of course they did.

[Bing Tsher E]

Also, those people now already have theirs. With the stench that iszrising because of this (remember, Apple's whole branding is based on image) I wonder if many more people will buy. Will the White iPhone 4 be an exceedingly valuable collectable on eBay in 20 years? We won't know yet for awhile.

(if I am an Apple hater why am I posting this comment on my iPod Touch?)

Re:Of course they did.

[RocketRabbit]

The iPhone is widely used in business. The Blackberry is useful in "large" businesses, but small and even medium sized businesses use the iPhone way more than they use Blackberries. Large businesses are discovering the iPhone as well.

This is just another classic "Only morons who like pretty things use the iPhone" troll, which somehow got modded up.

Re:Of course they did.

[RocketRabbit]

If you really need reliable voice communications you should get your amateur radio license.

Cell phone nets are often near or at capacity these days, even in rural areas. It's more profitable that way.

Re:Of course they did.

[donutello]

I can squirt pictures and stuff over to computers or other phones.

So you let your wife have an iPhone but get mad when your employees do, Steve?

Re:Of course they did.

[Anonymous Coward]

No, the bread-loaf-sized phone would perform terribly as a mobile phone. In terms of functioning purely as a cellular phone, performing good means fitting in your pocket, not dropping an unreasonable number of calls, and sounding fairly clear.

Now, as some sort of stationary home phone that uses a cellular network, if being bigger means that it sounds clearer and whatnot, then it would be reasonable for it to be bigger. But it still shouldn't be so big that it takes up too much space in the house.

So, epic fail with the example there.

Re:Of course they did.

[fostware]

Bah, show me an iPhone that can handle shared calendars, shared address books, public folders, or sharepoint calendars... (since Public Folders are being deprecated)

iPhone's in "big business" are there for show, and because RIM charge a mountain for BES licenses, especially since the BB 9000 and iPhone 4 cost about the same bought outright.

It's definitively not for the call quality...

Re:Of course they did.

[dangitman]

Now, as some sort of stationary home phone that uses a cellular network, if being bigger means that it sounds clearer and whatnot, then it would be reasonable for it to be bigger. But it still shouldn't be so big that it takes up too much space in the house.
So, epic fail with the example there.

Weird. You just basically rephrased my point, yet you call my point an "epic fail"? Does that mean your point is a "fail" too, seeing as it is exactly the same as mine?

Re:Of course they did.

[RocketRabbit]

Any iPhone can hook up with a standard caldav calendar, which can be shared between arbitrary numbers of people. I have 4 calendars for various purposes, all perfectly coexisting at once. You can do your calendaring and email and shit just as easily as you can on any phone, and in fact maybe more easily. The iPhone is capable of using public folders, for example you can use the web browser and SSL, and when you download the file it will be handled by the appropriate application. Uploading the file may be a bit more complicated, but it can always be emailed.

As far as "sharepoint" goes, do you mean "can the iPhone use MS's proprietary vomitous mangled aborted mess of a replacement for a nice LAMP server?" I don't know, never tried myself. But knowing MS it probably checks the user agent and barfs if it's not from Internet Exploder on Windows.

iPhone usage in big business is growing, but of course those RIM jobbers are everywhere. Companies buy Blackberries because they can control their employees more easily with them, and it makes sense in a perverse way, if your employees are all mentally 13 years old.

I can kind of see your point, through your lens. Instead of using a nice caldav server somewhere that will talk to anything, you have to use an iCalendar attachment and you SMS it to somebody. If you're hooked into the whole proprietary software world with your Exchange servers and Sharepoints and all that garbage, hooking into the Blackberry is natural.

The "call quality" is fine on the iPhone, just like any other digital cell phone. The iPhone 4 is obviously fucked up, however simply sticking to an earlier model, which work great even still, is an option for everybody.

Re:Of course they did.

[Raenex]

I find it interesting that you ignore web browsing and third party apps

I agree. Having one big screen was the main innovation of the iPhone, which is great for web browsing and apps, and goes way beyond "ooh, shiny". BlackBerry phones, with the dedicated keyboard, are definitely better for email.

Re:Of course they did.

[Anonymous Coward]

IAAISBAWMD (I am an iPhone/Symbian/Blackberry/Android/Windows Mobile Developer).

You can use Blackberry Desktop Manager for your routing scenario's. USB/BT-connect your blackberry to your laptop, and click a button on BDM. Bang, you've got mobile internet on your laptop.

My take on the point-by-point usability war: The blackberry is superior in every messaging aspect (because of the keyboard and messaging integration across the board).

However, its browser sucks bigtime, and the App Store is also pretty much empty. This is where the iPhone shines: its touch interface is way more solid than any other phone (including the disaster of a phone called the Blackberry Storm), which makes for a damn intuitive webbrowsing experience.

I've not been doing much with my iPhone lately, apart from using it as a Wifi-only based web-browsing device, and listening to podcasts (which is also available on every other phone, but my iPhone has 8GB of unused space waiting to be used).

Re:Of course they did.

[fostware]

If you're hooked into the whole proprietary software world with your Exchange servers and Sharepoints and all that garbage, hooking into the Blackberry is natural.

I didn't chose MS, the "big business" you're saying uses iPhones does. Those shared folders are how "big business" handles non-GAL company directories and calendars.

It's even a pain to code something to scrape OMA data to sync to a caldav server, including if it's an OSX server.

Personally though, I'm BAPR (BSD, Apache, Postgres, Ruby)

(BTW, I'm also Apple Leopard Server Certified)

Re:Of course they did.

[BitZtream]

RIM's market are business people and others who really use their phone for calling, email, and other communications. They bought it to do a function.

Really? Someone should tell RIM that cause their phones suck ass for all 3. Email on a BlackBerry is a fucking joke, they'd have done better had they included PINE. Call quality? REALLY?

Judging by your post, I'd say you've never used a real smartphone if you think RIM makes good devices for any purpose. The only thing they have is being IT approved due to device management options. From a user perspective you couldn't get any worse without taking the phone away completely.

Re:Of course they did.

[EngivalX]

Some other usage cases you missed:

• Emergency VNC to servers at data center: iphone over BB.
• SSH to servers: Not sure. Does BB have a decent SSH client? if it does, I can see it's keyboard being a major plus. The iphone can do the job, but it's damn painful to use.

In this case, I picked an iphone, mostly because I was sure software for remote maintenance was available. (Also, it was $400 cheaper in the short-term than the phone I really wanted)

Re:Of course they did.

[Moridineas]

Well, you can hold the Blackberry and make a phone call, does that count?

Have you used an iPhone 4 and a blackberry?

Attempt at humor aside, I'm guessing no...

Re:Of course they did.

[Mr Bubble]

I can't believe the negativity from you Apple haters. I use the hell out of my iPhone and it as nothing to do with "looking marvelous". The fact that people would buy a phone and put up with a shit network is because the phone is so damn good - not because we want to look marvelous. Look at the stats - we are the ones actually using the Internet traffic.

Re:Of course they did.

[mini me]

I bought my iPhone because I wanted an iPod touch that had mobile broadband capabilities. I am really not concerned about how it behaves as a phone. If I wanted a phone, I would get a phone, not a handheld computer.

Re:Of course they did.

[RocketRabbit]

Yeah, yeah, I know. People don't choose MS's business solutions, businesses do. Same deal with the Blackberry. I know a few people with one, but it seems everybody has an android or in iPhone now except my buddy who works for T-Mobile.

Re:Of course they did.

[mjwx]

Let's look at use cases. I am in the (fortunate) position to have an iPhone 3G (my wife's) and a BlackBerry 9000 (mine). The 9000 was chosen based on the keyboard size (over the Bold, etc.).

Silly rabbit, you're comparing horse crap to dog crap. In the end it's still crap.

I bought an Android phone last year and haven't looked back. Even high end WinMo phones are better then BB or Iphones (WinMo quality varies wildly, some WM phones are great, many others are complete crap).

Re:Of course they did.

[awyeah]

I switched from a BlackBerry Bold (9000) to the iPhone 3GS. The BlackBerry was better with not dropping calls, and it was better with e-mail. The screen was sharper (because it's the same resolution as the iPhone but half the size). But web browsing was just a terrible experience, and I must say, it's good having a decent web browser that doesn't sit at an hour glass for (sometimes) minutes at a time, making the device unusable until it's done working. That's really what ended up being the last straw.

The lack of available memory for third-party apps was awful. I think my Bold had 128MB or 192MB which is shared between the OS, user data (like e-mail), and applications (can't store anything other than media on the memory card). It ran out of memory all the time, you had to do a battery pull every few days to prevent it. I think there was a memory leak.

Oh. And the physical keyboard - boy do I miss that keyboard. The Bold had the best mobile keyboard I've ever used. I've gotten pretty good with the touch screen... but nothing beats that keyboard.

I'm really looking forward to seeing OS6, which is supposed to include a WebKit-based browser.

Re:Of course they did.

[awyeah]

The biggest thing I miss about my old BlackBerry was the physical keyboard. The Bold 9000, IMO, had an awesome keyboard. Oh, and I miss almost never dropping calls. I don't drop many more calls with the iPhone... but it's definitely more.

I don't miss that f*cking hourglass that used to appear every time you tried to go to a non-mobile web site. I don't miss memory leaks that would make the device lock up if I didn't pull the battery every few days.

I'm really rooting for RIM with OS6 though... It'll be nice to see a BlackBerry with a WebKit-based browser.

Quiet nokia!

[Anonymous Coward]

Nokia should STFU. Their N97 GPS antenna design leaves much to be desired.

Re:Quiet nokia!

[Jurily]

Yeah, it's not like they had hundreds of models on the market over decades, most of which without signal issues! Who the hell are they to talk about phones?!

Re:Quiet nokia!

[Anonymous Coward]

I should think that the GPS antenna design isn't really responsible for dropped calls, though...

Re:Quiet nokia!

[AmiMoJo]

I have never found any GPS receiver that had good reception. The better ones can lock on within a minute or two when in the window of a car without too much "urban canyon" blocking them, but it's not much fun waiting a couple of minutes while your phone figures out where you are just to bring up a map.

It seems to be worse overseas, perhaps because I turn the mobile data connection off so it can't use cell towers to get a rough idea of where it is. I thought that wouldn't need data but it doesn't seem to work on my Hero without it. I will take my new Galaxy S next year and see if that copes any better.

PR versus PR

[iluvcapra]

As long as no one is arguing over numbers and talking about anecdotes and "priorities" or whatever, this should be maximally annoying...

One thing is for certain, RIM’s customers don’t need to use a case for their BlackBerry smartphone to maintain proper connectivity.

It must be particularly galling to RIM that a lot of people prefer even an iPhone that drops calls to a Blackberry that doesn't, even when people are given the option to return their iPhone at no cost to them.

Re:PR versus PR

[RedK]

Where do you get that people prefer the iPhone ? RIM have a bigger marketshare in the smartphone sector than Apple does.

Re:PR versus PR

[iluvcapra]

I am struggling to recall RIM selling a million of anything in a weekend.

I don't think there's any debate that many, many people prefer an iPhone to a Blackberry. It's no skin off RIM's nose, of course: before the iPhone, these people simply used feature phones, because the Blackberry was more expensive and didn't have compelling features, like multimedia, a good web browser, etc. It still doesn't, for the most part. So what if your Pearl has 5 bars if the web browser doesn't have teh snappy and there is no app store?

Re:PR versus PR

[RedK]

Who cares how many sell in the weekend ? That's not a measure of anything besides marketing Hype. RIM outsells Apple quarter after quarter. That's all that matters. They have more Market share, I doubt they are jealous of Apple iAnything.

Re:PR versus PR

[dysonlu]

"a lot of people prefer even an iPhone that drops calls to a Blackberry that doesn't" What did you say about anecdotes again? What an irony. (FYI: RIM has a greater smartphone marketshare than Apple.)

Re:PR versus PR

[iluvcapra]

Keep in mind that RIM's smartphone market share, though greater, isn't insanely greater than Apple's market share -- last we saw it was 35% versus 27 %, with RIM falling and Apple rising in Q1 2010 (who knows where it is now), and even given that disparity Apple still takes a greater share of the profits and has higher customer satisfaction. The iPhone solution is simply more profitable to the producer and more beneficial to more buyers than Blackberrys.

Re:PR versus PR

[PopeRatzo]

It must be particularly galling to RIM that a lot of people prefer even an iPhone

But can you imagine how it makes Apple feel that so many people still prefer a Blackberry after all the money that Apple has spent marketing its phone? By thinking that one company is more "galled" by people buying it's competitor's product than it's own is anthropomorphizing a corporation in a way that seems peculiar to a certain segment of consumers.

Seriously, I understand fandom (though not of corporations) but I don't understand the attribution of human emotions to legal fictions created in order to make profit while avoiding liability.

Anyway, here in North America, Blackberry's market share is still more than double that of the iPhone, so I doubt RIM is particularly "galled".

Re:PR versus PR

[Anonymous Coward]

I recently switched from an iPhone to a Blackberry as I can no longer have a camera at work and I've gone from dropping a call a week or so with an "iPhone 3G" to dropping on almost every damn call on my shitberry.

Re:PR versus PR

[MrHanky]

The millions of people lining up to buy iPhones the first few days were like the millions of people lining up for The Phantom Menace: fans of a specific brand who are more easily swayed by hype than the average person. If you think it's a sign of quality, it's just because you're one of them.

It's a nice phone, but it's not that special. The only thing that sets it apart from the rest is a gyroscope (and a screen that still doesn't work properly in sunlight). A million people don't line up for a gyroscope.

Re:PR versus PR

[Man On Pink Corner]

Who cares how many sell in the weekend ? That's not a measure of anything besides marketing Hype

Um, no, that's a measure of how many units sold through in a given period of time.

Any company that disparages that metric is not long for the market.

Re:PR versus PR

[mgblst]

Blackberry do very well, and seem to have the businesss phone market sewn up. But only a complete moron would not think that bb, or every over phone company is not jealous of apple. Apple make more profit in their iphone division, than the entire industry combined. Everybody is jealous of that, except for dick heads like you, to scared to admit it..

Re:PR versus PR

[Anonymous Coward]

And Apple makes nearly 5x RIMs profit n the mobile phone market. Sell is an interesting word to use when the purchaser is not actually paying money.

Re:PR versus PR

[Anonymous Coward]

Very true. Any many of them were quite disappointed after the experience, too, since neither lived up to the hype.

Re:PR versus PR

[wtmoose]

I doubt they are jealous of Apple iAnything.

Then I doubt you've seen Apple's profit share of the cellular industry. Last I heard it was 32% for Apple vs 22% for RIM. http://www.ismashphone.com/images/Apple_and_The_Cell_Phone_Industry_Infographic.png

Re:PR versus PR

[santiagodraco]

First off Apple is making it very difficult to return phones, and I can assure you there are LOTS of people in the Apple stores trying to get the phones fixed and threatening to return them.

How about this interesting story...

I was in the Apple store in the "Domain" in Austin, tx. I went in for a phone exchange because I was instructed to do so by Apple tech support on the "chance" that it would fix my drop call problems (and proximity sensor issues). I had 2 case numbers and Apple made the appointment for the visit themselves.

Well, I get there and spend 60 minutes, 15 minutes waiting for help (past my appt time) and 45 minutes talking to the support person while he went to the back 3 times to "get my replacement phone" only to come back out and say "I just want to make sure you understand that after you exchange your phone you cannot ever return it for a refund" and then being unable to show me anything in writing that states that I would lose my contractual rights to a refund if the phone is exchanges in an attempted repair.

That's right, Apple stores are attempting to decieve customers that they cannot return phones if they are exchanged for repair during their 30 day period. They cannot show anything in writing to this affect (because nothing in writing exists) and when pressured they will simply say "oh I know how the system works and it is simply impossible to return an exchanged phone because the serial numbers change". How interesting. But they cannot explain how that can be possible when the exchange work order shows both the original phones serial and the exchange phones serial"

So those of you that claim that no one wants to return their phones should walk into an Apple store and see what they are doing to keep people from doing so. The intimidation (with a pleasant voice) tactics used to stop customers from doing so (since most customers will try an exchange at least once before refunding) is despicable and probably illegal.

Re:PR versus PR

[yabos]

Even more galling is that many RIM employees use iPhones. I have 3 friends that work there and I've asked about whether RIM gets mad at you if you use an iPhone on the campus. Apparently there are lots of people that do and no they don't seem to get in trouble for it.

Re:PR versus PR

[R3d M3rcury]

I am struggling to recall RIM selling a million of anything in a weekend.

This is something that always bothers my "reality versus accounting" soul.

See, here's the thing: Apple opens a product up for pre-orders a few weeks before it ships. A bunch of people buy it on pre-order. Then, the first weekend, Apple ships all those orders and, on Monday, Apple announces having sold millions of whatevers the first weekend.

Now, from an accounting perspective, this is accurate. You can't book sales until you ship the item. So even though Apple got money over a few weeks, they couldn't actually put it on their books as income until they shipped out the devices. So when Apple shipped out the devices is when they booked the revenue, all of which occurred that first weekend. Plus whatever they sold in the stores over the weekend. So, from an accounting standpoint, it's accurate--they made the money that first weekend.

However, the reality perspective says that the item was available for sale a few weeks beforehand. If I had a product and I offered it for sale one year before it finally shipped, and I had one person per day buying it, on the day I shipped I could claim that 365 bought it in one day. But realistically, I had one sale per day. Based on past history, I would have a hard time believing that I would have 365 sales on the day after I shipped those 365. It's more likely that I would continue having 1 per day.

Apple releases these numbers to look impressive. And, don't get me wrong, selling a million or so devices in a few weeks is impressive--I've never sold that many things in a few years! But it wasn't "one weekend"--that's an accounting trick.

Re:PR versus PR

[Anonymous Coward]

I seriously have no idea how you manage that, I have a Curve 8900 (Javelin), and a Bold 9700, neither have EVER had a dropped call unless I've driven into an area where there is no cellular coverage at all, irregardless of carrier... I think people need to learn to not deal with dropped calls. Up here in Canada, we have amazing network coverage, and dropped calls are considered unacceptable... Whereas when I go to the states people tell me its normal to have dropped calls, and they accept it.

Re:PR versus PR

[falconwolf]

It must be particularly galling to RIM that a lot of people prefer even an iPhone that drops calls to a Blackberry that doesn't, even when people are given the option to return their iPhone at no cost to them.

Citation?

Falcon

Re:PR versus PR

[Anonymous Coward]

wordpress.com and macworld

you make a good argument

Re:PR versus PR

[foniksonik]

Anecdotally I work at a company where getting a Blackberry is an email away. IT services has hundreds of unopened phones sitting there with pre-registered numbers for anyone who needs one. I have several co-workers who were assigned these phones but have yet to open their boxes. So in my experience RIMs numbers may just be a little inflated.

OTOH we also have tens of MacBook Pros also sitting in boxes at any given time. I'm personally pulling to replace the Blackberrys with iPhones but we'd have to get through the inventory on hand firat at least.

Re:PR versus PR

[Anonymous Coward]

Keep in mind that RIM's smartphone market share, though greater, isn't insanely great er than Apple's market share

This sounds familiar...

Re:PR versus PR

[Anonymous Coward]

And they will only go see it 20 more times today.

Re:PR versus PR

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple still takes a greater share of the profits and has higher customer satisfaction. The iPhone solution is simply more profitable to the producer and more beneficial to more buyers than Blackberrys.

Uh-huh. That was customer satisfaction pre-iPhone4 though. Since Apple doesn't plan to fix the iPhone 4, we'll see if people keep paying a premium for a phones that they are no longer all that satisfied with.

Re:PR versus PR

[Beeftopia]

Seriously, I understand fandom (though not of corporations) but I don't understand the attribution of human emotions to legal fictions created in order to make profit while avoiding liability.

"If you can persuade your customer to tattoo your name on their chest, they probably will not switch brands. " - an Indiana University professor on Harley Davidson owners.

It's just a matter of time before some fanboi has Apple tattooed on his chest.

Re:PR versus PR

[dissy]

First off Apple is making it very difficult to return phones, and I can assure you there are LOTS of people in the Apple stores trying to get the phones fixed and threatening to return them.

That little fact has actually been very frustrating to me to no end this past week...

Despite the issues with iPhone 4, I still want one. Really want one :/
Unfortunately due to another issue, using a credit card is not exactly an option for me for a number of months. More months than I would like to wait to be honest. (Using someone else card could would with paying them ahead of time, but it's an inconvenience for all involved.) The in-store delay in my city still seems to be about 3+ weeks, and even then I assume that is only if you are on the waiting list.

I desperately wish I could find one of these people that want to return their phone.
I would *gladly* pay their full price back, if they would sell it to me to transfer to my account.

The thing is, I can't find a single person willing to do this.

So, if there is anyone out there in the central Ohio area who is so pissed about these problems they want to return the phone and Apple is giving you the slightest problems (or not!), please contact me! You'll get your money back, it will just be from me.
If just one person that is this upset and wanting to wash their hands of the whole thing would be willing to sell their phone to me instead of 'sticking it to the man' with a return, you would make a geek very happy!

Re:PR versus PR

[rsborg]

Now, from an accounting perspective, this is accurate. You can't book sales until you ship the item. So even though Apple got money over a few weeks, they couldn't actually put it on their books as income until they shipped out the devices. So when Apple shipped out the devices is when they booked the revenue, all of which occurred that first weekend.

Isn't this the same for any product that has pre-orders?

Why is Apple suddenly more evil when other retails and manufacturers have done the same thing for years?

Re:PR versus PR

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong. Any company that thinks sales over a weekend is more important than sales over the long term is not long for the market. Economics 101.

Re:PR versus PR

[Anonymous Coward]

Who in his right mind would not just take the refund and buy a new (i)phone immediately? Are they still "sold out"?

Re:PR versus PR

[BitZtream]

Wouldn't surprise me if they were saying it to lower the number of idiots returning their phones for issues they are having that they area only having because they read online that the phone is having problems.

For reference, my sister-in-law got a replacement just a few days ago without a hassle, those she wasn't doing so because of 'antenna' issues so that probably had a lot to do with it.

Re:PR versus PR

[drinkypoo]

The Crackberry is a chunky, outdated piece of shit and it has only stayed around so long because there was no real competition. They can either improve their game or they can become irrelevant. And I say this as someone who thinks Apple is evil and must be ignored.

Re:PR versus PR

[Blackajack]

"I just want to make sure you understand that after you exchange your phone you cannot ever return it for a refund"

"Oh, I'd like to just get a refund then. Thank you. Hello, I'd like to buy a new iPhone." Or is it that you can't buy a new one after getting a refund?

Re:PR versus PR

[Anonymous Coward]

I dunno how it works in the US, but if they try that one in Australia, it is illegal. In Australia, under our statutory warranties, it is illegal for a company to deny a refund or exchange. Doesn't matter if the item is replaced, under the law, it becomes a new "contract" with the seller.

Re:PR versus PR

[Man On Pink Corner]

Do you, by chance, know what the difference between the terms sell-in and sell-through is?

Re:PR versus PR

[santiagodraco]

Oh it's illegal here too, trust me. The fact that they are doing it is mind boggling. I can't say if it's happening in other stores but it sure happened in this one.

I really should have recorded the conversation and kept the phone, then posted the conversation online.

As for those saying just return it and buy something else... well maybe once something else comparable is released... but right now, barring the antenna issue (and prox issues which I'm sure can be fixed with firmware) I love the phone. Now if it would just WORK as a phone where I live I'd be happy.

I'm still off the Apple bandwagon big time. No more Apple products for me unless they make up for this behavior in a big way.

Re:PR versus PR

[santiagodraco]

Yes they are sold out. The stock in stores is just for exchanges... and while I was in the store for my 60 min period I saw hmm 4-5 exchanges (could have been others I missed) all for iPhone 4s.

Re:PR versus PR

[R3d M3rcury]

It doesn't make them any more evil, I suppose. But it does irk me when some fanboi says, "Gosh! They sold 1,000,000 iWhatevers in one weekend!" Because it isn't really true. It isn't really true when other people do it as well.

This is sort of wandering off-topic, I suppose, but one thing I always liked about Apple is that they were a little bit more honest than other manufacturers. I'm an old Mac user--my first Mac was a Macintosh--and I remember Apple selling 14" and 16" displays back when everyone else was selling 15" and 17" displays. Of course, these were the same displays--Apple was telling you the viewable area and the other vendors were telling you the size of the screen. It became a lawsuit eventually and display vendors started having to do the small print saying that 17" was not the viewable area. Apple had to do this, too, because at this point they realized that bigger numbers sell and had started selling 17" displays like everyone else.

Re:PR versus PR

[Anonymous Coward]

The fatal flaw in your analysis is that there are just as many people in line who didn't pre-order as those that did. Most of those get turned away... Had there not been the pre-order period the phones STILL would have sold out.

Re:PR versus PR

[AmiMoJo]

Few people buy Blackberrys for anything other than work. A more meaningful comparison would be their shares of the business market.

Because the competition never lies, right.

[Anonymous Coward]

I suspect all the Apple haters will be using this as "evidence" that other phones don't have problems like this, because we all know a company would never take the chance to bash its competitors (especially high-profile ones like Apple)...

Re:Because the competition never lies, right.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yesterday:
I suspect all the Apple lovers will be using this as "evidence" that other phones have problems like this, because we all know a company would never take the chance to bash its competitors (especially high-profile ones like Apple)...

Re:Because the competition never lies, right.

[LBArrettAnderson]

No, we don't need any more evidence; Steve gave us all the evidence we need yesterday that there is a serious problem with iPhone 4's antenna. It drops nearly twice as many calls as the 3GS. It required a bit more research since Steve didn't tell us the baseline for how many calls the 3GS drops per 100, but based on some AT&T statements in the past, it's probably between 1 and 2%, meaning that 1 additional dropped call per 100 *calls* is a good 50 to 100% increase.

Re:Because the competition never lies, right.

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple says: "...btw, it's not like we're the only ones who have had problems with our antenna designs.". Hardly a controversial statement (unless you hate Apple or are their competitor).

RIM and Nokia say: "Our phones have never had any antenna problems, function over form every time, honest injun!".

Yeah, it's the Apple fanboys that are being irrational here...

While there will always be fanboys who defend "their" brand to any extreme I think it's only Microsoft and Apple who have such a staunch army of haters willing to use the slightest flaw as an example of how they're evil and their products worthless.

Re:Because the competition never lies, right.

[iluvcapra]

but based on some AT&T statements in the past, it's probably between 1 and 2%, meaning that 1 additional dropped call per 100 *calls* is a good 50 to 100% increase.

This is a bit like being stuck on the roadside arguing with your girlfriend about how much gas you put in the tank at the last stop: "We had half a gallon left, and I put in half a gallon! I INCREASED OUR FUEL BY 100%!"

Re:Because the competition never lies, right.

[LBArrettAnderson]

Not at all, no. Dropped calls tend to affect people in certain areas more than they affect others. In this case it also affects people without bumpers more than people with them, and people who don't know to avoid the death point more than people who know about it. This means that it's likely that certain people are dropping *many* more calls than they otherwise would.

Re:Because the competition never lies, right.

[Cheech Wizard]

A flaw, yes. A *serious* flaw, no.

Re:Because the competition never lies, right.

[Jurily]

Your argument kind of makes sense until you look at their respective track record. Of course they've had some bad models, but for all intents and purposes, that's within the error margin in this discussion.

This is like Santa Claus mocking their logistics.

Re:Because the competition never lies, right.

[iluvcapra]

This assertion is not captured in the statistic. It's merely truthy unless you can find support for it.

Watch your weasel words: "tend to," "likely."

Re:Because the competition never lies, right.

[LBArrettAnderson]

50% to 100% more dropped calls is not a serious flaw? Wow.

Re:Because the competition never lies, right.

[LBArrettAnderson]

Weasel words? You mean like "the iPhone 4 only drops 1 more call per 100 than the iPhone 3GS" ? Steve knew very well that most people would interpret that as only 1% more dropped calls, or perhaps statistical noise based on the amount of available data.

Are you refuting the claims I made? I don't have statistics, but they are pretty common sense claims. Bringing additional factors into a set of statistics does exactly that.

Re:Because the competition never lies, right.

[Elfich47]

50% to 100% more dropped calls than what? What is the baseline being used to determine the increased drop rate?

Re:Because the competition never lies, right.

[LBArrettAnderson]

http://www.engadget.com/2010/01/28/atandt-says-its-closing-the-gap-on-dropped-calls/

Apparently the baseline is actually about 1%. The issue we're discussing is whether or not the iPhone 4 antenna absolutely sucks. With a 100% increase in dropped calls over the 3GS, I'd say the answer is "yes."

Re:Because the competition never lies, right.

[iluvcapra]

"the iPhone 4 only drops 1 more call per 100 than the iPhone 3GS" ?

This is an objective statement, something known technically as a statement of fact. Something which is falsifiable. Notice the numbers and the unequivocal voice.

I don't have statistics, but they are pretty common sense claims.

This is a subjective statement, something known technically as a statement of an opinion. Something which is not falsifiable. Notice the appeal to "common sense." I'm not refuting your claims because you make none, you just riff on your folk knowledge of cellphone reception, 90% of which you've acquired over the past week from sensationalist websites.

Steve knew very well that most people would interpret that as only 1% more dropped calls, or perhaps statistical noise based on the amount of available data.

Nobody said that it was, but since you suggested it, are you able to characterize the difference as anything more than statistical noise? Or, even more to the point, are you able to characterize this statistic as being meaningful in an actual purchasing decision? That it's a problem I'm happy to concede, but is it enough of a problem that someone would rather buy a different phone, given the iPhone's other features? That's the criteria in question here, and it's much more to-the-point than "100% more dropped calls."

Re:Because the competition never lies, right.

[PopeRatzo]

A flaw, yes. A *serious* flaw, no.

Please describe a more serious "flaw" for a cell phone than dropping calls.

"Yes, it's a phone, and you can't rely on its ability to maintain a connection, but that's just a minor flaw".

This is why I own an iPod Touch and keep an old fashioned reliable cellular phone for making and taking calls.

Re:Because the competition never lies, right.

[LBArrettAnderson]

It's a statement of fact, yes, with the intention of misleading mindless masses into believing something entirely different. Steve could have given the numbers. He lied about not being allowed to. AT&T has published them in the past -- http://www.engadget.com/2010/01/28/atandt-says-its-closing-the-gap-on-dropped-calls/

Weasel words can be completely factual objective statements with the intention of making people believe something false, and in this case they most certainly were.

Re:Because the competition never lies, right.

[Elfich47]

The article you site discussed the drop rate for the AT&T fleet. The drop rate for the fleet is 1%, my error is stating that the drop rate is 1.4%. We do not know what the drop rate for the 3GS phone is. It could be higher or lower than the drop rate for the fleet average. Without knowing what the drop rate for the 3GS phone is it is impossible to determine if the antenna for the iphone4 has a higher drop rate than average. I think we can agree that the antenna in the iphone4 is significantly more sensitive to how the user holds the phone in comparison to previous iphones and some Nokia and Rim phones. This makes the iphone4 prone to different levels of reception depending upon how one holds the phone. I believe the following has been shown: The iphone4 has a higher gain (than the 3GS phopne) when someone is not touching the gap on the lower left, it also has a lower gain when someone is touching the gap on the lower left. You have not stated what criteria you use to determine if an antenna sucks. Please state your criteria.

Re:Because the competition never lies, right.

[iluvcapra]

Please describe a more serious "flaw" for a cell phone than dropping calls.

Having to be rebooted every day

Four-hour battery life

I'd happily have a dropped call out of every 100 (or out of every 20, really) if I had a phone that never required a reboot and lasted all day. It's more than just a phone, after all -- if we were talking about a RAZR or a simple Nokia it'd be a different matter.

Re:Because the competition never lies, right.

[KarmaMB84]

4 hours under non-stop heavy use != battery life for typical usage patterns.

Re:Because the competition never lies, right.

[iluvcapra]

Weasel words can be completely factual objective statements with the intention of making people believe something false, and in this case they most certainly were.

This is another way of arguing that people are incapable of thinking critically, or shouldn't be expected to, and I completely reject this. It's an evil thing to believe. Besides, you were able to apply your deductive genius and come up with the 100% number all by yourself using only the information at hand, so how much of a weasel job could it possibly have been? And, couldn't some member of the "mindless mass" see your argument and believe that the iPhone drops 100% of calls? Wouldn't you be responsible for that, given your assertion of Job's responsibility?

The problem with your re-characterization of the numbers is that it posits a misleading statistical trial, wherein someone makes 100 phone calls and is seeing if 99 of them go through-- the probability of him failing with an iPhone 4G is 50% to 100% greater than with a 3GS. The problem is that the trial is completely unrealistic, and nobody makes a hundred calls and keeps track of wether 1 or 2 of them fail, and the outcome of such a trial has pretty much zero practical bearing on wether a phone is considered unusable or not. The annoyance factor of a dropped call is on a call-by-call basis, and in this realistic use case, the difference between the 3GS and the 4G is, well, the difference between .4% and 1.4%.

Re:Because the competition never lies, right.

[dwightk]

Between 1 and 2 is not equal to less than 1, so the increase cannot be 100%

Re:Because the competition never lies, right.

[yabos]

Except Steve said LESS THAN 1 call more per 100 calls are dropped on the iPhone 4. That doesn't mean it drops twice as many calls as the 3GS.

Re:Because the competition never lies, right.

[PopeRatzo]

It's more than just a phone, after all

Thank you for your honesty.

Re:Because the competition never lies, right.

[falconwolf]

Except Steve said LESS THAN 1 call more per 100 calls are dropped on the iPhone 4

Except the "iPhone 4 drops more calls than the older iPhone 3GS -- 'less than one additional dropped call per 100,'Apple CEO Steve Jobs said during a news conference Friday.". See that "older iPhone 3GS"? That is a key phrase.

Falcon

Re:Because the competition never lies, right.

[falconwolf]

I'd happily have a dropped call out of every 100 (or out of every 20, really) if I had a phone that never required a reboot and lasted all day. It's more than just a phone, after all -- if we were talking about a RAZR or a simple Nokia it'd be a different matter.

See, that's your uses. I used to only use a phone to make a call. Because my memory is bad now I also use my phone's built in calendar for appointments and such. While I'd miss the calendar, I'd be real pissed if I could not use my phone to make and receive calls. And those are the only things I use the phone for. I don't play music on it. Though I've received text messages, spam, I've never sent one. And the only tymes I used the camera was to take a photo of my callers, when one calls the photo is displayed.

Falcon

Re:Because the competition never lies, right.

[LBArrettAnderson]

We've seen it in *this thread!* People are misunderstanding what Jobs said -- even on slashdot! The people here are supposed to be intelligent. Imagine how confused normal users must be. You know very well that Jobs phrased it that way in order to mislead people. He does it all the time.

Re:Because the competition never lies, right.

[yyxx]

It could be higher or lower than the drop rate for the fleet average.

No, it can't be. Fleet average is 1%, the iPhone 4 is 1% worse than the 3GS. Even if the 3GS never dropped calls, the iPhone 4 could at most be average. Of course, given the problems with 3GS call dropping, it's a pretty safe bet that the 3GS is at best average if not worse.

Re:Because the competition never lies, right.

[Anonymous Coward]

Other phones don't have problems like this because they don't have exposed antennas.

They have other problems, even grip-related problems, that they share with the iPhone, but this is an Apple-specific screw-up.

Nokia ftw

[Jurily]

"You're telling us about antennas?"

looks and simplicity over function

[locopuyo]

Apple has and always will be a company that prioritizes looks and simplicity over function. It's the same reason their products have almost no user options. They are too complicated. They force you to use the product the way they want you to.

Re:looks and simplicity over function

[knappe duivel]

Apple has and always will be a company that prioritizes looks and simplicity over function. It's the same reason their products have almost no user options. They are too complicated. They force you to use the product the way they want you to.

User options? Force you? We are talking antennas here. Nobody is forcing anybody, nobody is limiting your options or forcing you to do anything. Don't panic please!

Re:looks and simplicity over function

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple has and always will be a company that prioritizes looks and simplicity over function. It's the same reason their products have almost no user options. They are too complicated. They force you to use the product the way they want you to.

Assuming you're talking about their phones, sure.

I don't have an iphone or ipod, but I do have a Mac, and there are quite a few options and settings exposed through the GUI, and quite a few more exposed through the command line/config files (eg. Defaults)

Re:looks and simplicity over function

[diegocg]

a company that prioritizes looks and simplicity

Yeah, usability is great. But I'm afraid that normal people love it. Guess why there are a lot of people who would rather buy iPads instead of netbooks with the awesome touchpad input interface?

Re:looks and simplicity over function

[Uranium-238]

Becuase they're fucking retarded and can't handle a touchpad?

Re:looks and simplicity over function

[vague disclaimer]

Apple has and always will be a company that prioritizes looks and simplicity over function.

Wrong. Apple is a company that considers looks and simplicity to be part of function

Re:looks and simplicity over function

[Anonymous Coward]

Try USING a Mac, some time, you fucking retard. It's just as configurable as Linux. And for a long time prior to this (although admittedly no longer), Macs were the computer of choice if you wanted to tinker.

The iDevices are a different matter entirely, and for good reason.

Re:looks and simplicity over function

[dangitman]

Becuase they're fucking retarded and can't handle a touchpad?

Ah yes, the typical response of someone who lacks mental capacity, but thinks they are intelligent. When confronted with something you don't understand, you react with "they're all retarded, and not smart enough to see things my way, which is the only valid way of seeing things."

I'm pretty sure everyone who had bought an iPad has used a touchpad before, and has no difficulty using one.

Re:looks and simplicity over function

[LynnwoodRooster]

User options? Force you? We are talking antennas here. Nobody is forcing anybody, nobody is limiting your options or forcing you to do anything. Don't panic please!

Other than forcing you to hold it differently, of course...

Re:looks and simplicity over function

[falconwolf]

Apple has and always will be a company that prioritizes looks and simplicity over function.

I got my MacBook Pro because of functionality and price not because it looks better. Hell, other than the Apple logo on the cover it looks the same as laptops from other companies. And yes I included "price" above. Before I bought my MBP I compared the prices of a few laptops from different companies at the price of the MBP was only $50 higher than the cheapest laptop but much lower than other prices.

It's the same reason their products have almost no user options.

What user options? Like the option to run X11 and apps for it? Like the option of installing .rpm and apt-get or .deb packages? Like running MS Windows? Though I currently only run Leopard on my Mac when I install Snow Leopard I also plan to install Ubuntu and dualboot. If I wanted to I could install MS Windows as well. BUT I DO NOT!!! And guess what else... I'm typing this in a Firefox tab, I run Thunderbird as my email client, for my office suite I have NeoOiffce, the native Mac port of OpenOffice.org. And while I have XCode installed I also use Eclipse for development.

Falcon

Re:looks and simplicity over function

[Phroggy]

Apple has and always will be a company that prioritizes looks and simplicity over function. It's the same reason their products have almost no user options. They are too complicated. They force you to use the product the way they want you to.

Let's be careful here: this problem was NOT caused by Apple's prioritization of form over function. On the contrary, the reason why the iPhone 4 has external antennas is entirely due to function, and they sacrificed form in order to do it (the black lines that separate the three different antennas are an aesthetic blemish, which Jobs acknowledged when the iPhone 4 was introduced).

Essentially what happened was this: Apple came up with the idea of using external antennas in an effort to boost signal strength and improve reception. The engineers warned that with an external antenna, you'll lose some signal strength when you hold it in certain ways. Management said "OK, we'll test it and see what happens." They tested it, and found that it wasn't a problem, so they shipped it.

So why did Apple's testing conclude that it wasn't a problem, when it clearly is a problem? First, because they probably didn't do a lot of testing in the lab with sweaty left-handed people. Second, Apple's campus gets great reception, and the problem is only noticeable in areas of poor reception. Third, whenever they took the phone out into the "real world" for field testing, they kept the phone disguised inside a case so nobody would notice they were using a prototype iPhone 4 - and the case eliminates this problem by preventing direct contact. Finally, a software bug made it look like the signal was fine when it really wasn't, so they didn't notice the effects of holding it in different ways.

Apple should have noticed the problem in their lab testing, and they didn't. That's the root of the issue here; it has nothing to do with looks. The fact that you assume the problem has anything to do with looks simply means that Apple's product designers are GENIUSES - they were prioritizing function, but designed it so well that you thought they were prioritizing looks. Never mind that the function doesn't work as well as they thought it did - function is still what drove this design.

By the way, I have a couple of coworkers with iPhone 4s who say they've never had a problem.

Re:looks and simplicity over function

[BitZtream]

So I'd have to wager that neither you, nor the people who modded you up have never touched anything Apple has ever sold.

Generally, its advisable to not say that something is 'too complicated' while at the same time saying 'it has no options'. Yes its possible, but it certainly tells me you've never used Apple products.

Re:looks and simplicity over function

[drinkypoo]

Let's be careful here: this problem was NOT caused by Apple's prioritization of form over function. On the contrary, the reason why the iPhone 4 has external antennas is entirely due to function, and they sacrificed form in order to do it (the black lines that separate the three different antennas are an aesthetic blemish, which Jobs acknowledged when the iPhone 4 was introduced).

That is total bullshit because if they had covered the antennas with plastic, which would have interfered with their chosen appearance but altered the form in a way that would reduce the problem, then it would have more or less solved the problem. But instead they wanted to bring the phone out with a metal ring around it. Form over function, it doesn't get any simpler than that does it? Further, another change they could have made to the form would be to make an external antenna like everyone else's, and either have a nub sticking out or a Sony-esque loop. Again, form over function.

Apple should have noticed the problem in their lab testing, and they didn't. That's the root of the issue here; it has nothing to do with looks. The fact that you assume the problem has anything to do with looks simply means that Apple's product designers are GENIUSES - they were prioritizing function, but designed it so well that you thought they were prioritizing looks. Never mind that the function doesn't work as well as they thought it did - function is still what drove this design.

What you're telling us is that Apple's very testing methodology prioritizes form over function. This is not a supporting argument for you, it's ammunition for the rest of us. If Apple cared about function more than form then they'd care enough to do real-world testing without the cover. Perhaps they'd even choose testers who don't tend to lose phones. I've never lost a cellphone and haven't lost a wallet in probably two decades, well more than half my lifetime *knock on particleboard* They prioritized the appearance of the prototype over its function even in testing! This is just another typical Apple-esque failure at Apple.

By the way, I have a couple of coworkers with iPhone 4s who say they've never had a problem.

By the way, you are making bullshit apologies for Apple.

Re:looks and simplicity over function

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually they design their products around the way normal people use their computers. The lack of extraneous stuff to accommodate hobbyists is a feature that limits bloat and makes everything work more smoothly.

If you really want to adjust something you can fire up the UNIX terminal and do whatever.

Re:looks and simplicity over function

[Phroggy]

I'm not sure how I could explain more clearly, but you've obviously misunderstood. You've suggested all sorts of things Apple could have done to fix the antenna problem at the expense of looking nice, and are insisting that the reason Apple didn't do those things is because it was more important for the phone to look nice. That is incorrect. The reason Apple didn't do those things is because Apple believed there wasn't a problem. They didn't drop calls during their testing. They didn't notice the signal strength dropping. The antenna seemed to function just fine.

What you're telling us is that Apple's very testing methodology prioritizes form over function.

How on earth did you conclude exactly the opposite of what I just said?

If Apple cared about function more than form then they'd care enough to do real-world testing without the cover.

This has nothing to do with caring about function more than form. They did test it. They didn't see this problem in testing.

Apple didn't prioritize form over function in the design of the iPhone 4. Of course they tried to keep the whole thing a secret - competitors who prioritize form over function will try to copy their look, and sell to consumers who prioritize form over function, which will cost Apple bazillions of dollars in lost sales. Apple could make a phone that looks like a turd, and somebody else would come along and make a cheaper phone that looks like a turd, market it by saying "it looks just like Apple's expensive turd phone but it costs less!" and people would buy it because they're idiots.

They prioritized the appearance of the prototype over its function even in testing! This is just another typical Apple-esque failure at Apple.

There have been plenty of times when Apple prioritized form over function in the past. The 20th Anniversary Mac and the G4 Cube were overpriced flops. More successful examples include the iMac (from its original incarnation built from laptop parts bolted to a CRT, to the iMac G4 "desk lamp", to the modern all-in-one LCD design) and the Mac mini (successor to the G4 Cube, but sold at a reasonable price). Don't forget the proprietary Apple Display Connector and the USB speakers that shipped with the G4 Cube (which deliberately draw more power than the USB spec allows, so they could potentially fry other computers if plugged into a standard USB port), the buttonless Mighty Mouse that doesn't register right-clicks unless you lift your left finger, and probably a whole host of other terrible ideas. The iPhone 4 is not one of these.

Re:looks and simplicity over function

[drinkypoo]

What you're telling us is that Apple's very testing methodology prioritizes form over function.

How on earth did you conclude exactly the opposite of what I just said?

I drew a completely different conclusion than you did from the available fact. You conclude that they prioritized function, but they clearly a) performed inadequate testing, that is, in an environment in which it is too easy to get a signal, and b) put the emphasis on the machine on design.

There have been plenty of times when Apple prioritized form over function in the past. [...] The iPhone 4 is not one of these.

Yeah, it's an example of Apple prioritizing form over function in the present. You almost got me there!

Re:looks and simplicity over function

[Phroggy]

What you're telling us is that Apple's very testing methodology prioritizes form over function.

How on earth did you conclude exactly the opposite of what I just said?

I drew a completely different conclusion than you did from the available fact. You conclude that they prioritized function, but they clearly a) performed inadequate testing, that is, in an environment in which it is too easy to get a signal, and b) put the emphasis on the machine on design.

Fine, draw your own conclusions, then. You're free to disagree with me, but don't try to justify your position by opening with "What you're telling us is [exactly the opposite of what you just told us]."

Perhaps the confusion lies in our definitions. You seem to be implying that if Apple had ignored aesthetics altogether and assembled a hideous monstrosity of a phone with the sole goal of making it work well, but then failed to adequately test it to make sure it really did work as well as it was supposed to, you'd call it "prioritizing form over function." I would call it "inadequate testing."

If, on the other hand, Apple were to design a beautiful, sleek and elegant phone, deliberately sacrificing functionality, usability, or reliability in order to preserve the aesthetic beauty of their creation, whether it actually worked or not I would call that "prioritizing form over function." I'm not sure what you would call it. My assertion is that this is NOT what Apple did with the iPhone 4; the reason they switched to using external antennas was an attempt to improve reception, not because it would look better. Your disagreement is baffling to me, but you're entitled to be wrong. :-)

Re:Video Proof

[LBArrettAnderson]

From engadget's transcript:

"10:43AM Ryan from gdgt: You showed people almost covering the entire phone in their hand, but on the iPhone 4 it can happen with just a touch. Can you explain that difference?
Bob: When you touch the phone, you put yourself between the signal and your phone, so when you touch that spot you can attenuate the signal, and if you grip it with your whole hand, you can attenuate it even more. We don't build phones with an antenna on top...

Hmm, that didn't really sound like an answer to us."

No matter how much you complain about the bad press Apple has been getting lately, it is certainly deserved. The iPhone 4 antenna issue is *not* the same issue that other phones experience, and is much more severe.

Re:Video Proof

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah RIM, it must hurt seeing your Phone subjected to the same sort of pain Apple has been having. Proof is in the video. Sure, it might not happen at all, but it does happen, and we have video proof of it. RIM and Nokia need to deal with it.

I for one haven't had an issue at all with my iPhone 4. It's been great.

yes ... because you use the way Steve wants you to use it : pull it out of your pocket ever once in a while when some hot chicks are around and then carefully put it back in. My fiancé's ICrap4 drops calls all day long while at home and mine doesn't ... I have an old arse Curve and we are both on ATT ...

So the videos are true?

[diegocg]

It seems they are giving vague answers instead of answering the real question. Steve Jobs played videos where you can see clearly how Blackberrys lose signal depending how you hold them. Are the videos true? If they are, how must I hold a Blackberry to avoid losing signal? If they aren't true, why RIM isn't suing Apple? That is the question I want to see answered.

Re:So the videos are true?

[brufleth]

They did respond. They're effectively saying, "this is stupid." They don't need to give more of a response because while Apple has created a few phones Nokia and RIM have created hundreds of different models from the stupid to the very cutting edge smart phone. It is like Starbucks getting into the light bulb industry and telling GE they're doing it wrong. It isn't worth dignifying with a response.

Re:So the videos are true?

[Sycraft-fu]

Well if they are true, I can't replicate it. My Blackberry for sure has signal variations based on its position. I'm quite sure my body interferes with it too, no way it can't. However it doesn't drop calls when I hold it. I grip with the "whole hand wraparound" method all the time, just how I hold the thing. It always seems to work.

As for a suit, RIM might but then again that's a pain in the ass. Lots of money involved and nothing might get decided in the end. I mean if Apple can show a case where they are right, even if it is a longshot case, that can be enough. They say "Well when we did this, we lost signal," and that could be enough. They weren't lying.

Also with libel cases you have to prove three things:

1) That the words written were false. As I said, maybe Apple can show that indeed it does happen in a 1 in a million case. Could be enough. The truth is a total defense against libel.

2) That the person writing the words knew they were false, or at least reasonably should have known. If you write something honestly believing it to be true, that's not libel. You have to be aware that it is false.

3) That the words were written with the intent to cause harm. You can write knowingly false statements for other reasons, like parody, and that's not libel. It is only libel if the reason you did it was to attempt to harm the party you were writing about.

In this case, proving all three of those might be real hard. As such, easier to just issue a press release saying "They are full of shit."

Re:So the videos are true?

[phantomcircuit]

What videos? All I see is "Get Quicktime".

Re:So the videos are true?

[iluvcapra]

It is like Starbucks getting into the light bulb industry and telling GE they're doing it wrong.

Strangely enough, there were people from time to time that argued that GE was doing it wrong, mainly by building planned obsolescence into the bulbs, and tried to bring competing solutions to market. Luckily for GE they had a cartel that allowed them to not "in-dignify" themselves with a market response.

Not saying that RIM and Nokia are a cartel or anything, but if they want to assert their superiority it's not reasonable for them to do it on the back of their "reputation" or any such nonsense. Nokia makes phones with OK reception -- their OS's suck, however, and smartphones require both.

Re:So the videos are true?

[Anonymous Coward]

Steve Jobs's point wasn't that Nokia and RIM make bad phones or don't know how to design antennas. Watch the video. Jobs wasn't slamming Nokia or RIM. In fact, he went out of his way to say that they make great phones. All Jobs did was to take twenty minutes to put the problem into context for the reporters who've spent a month making it sound like 1) Apple is the only company in the industry with this problem; and 2) the iPhone is a total dog.

His point was that 1) Apple isn't the only company that makes phones that can lose reception when you put your hand on it and he showed the videos to prove it; and 2) if the problem really was as hideous as reporters had made it sound, Apple would be getting a lot more customer complaints and products returns than the data shows. And Jobs backed up his arguments with empirical data.

Personally, I'd like a little empirical data on how many Slashdotters who are slamming Jobs in this thread have actually watched the video. I'd bet the percentage is vanishingly small.

Re:So the videos are true?

[Moridineas]

They don't need to give more of a response because while Apple has created a few phones Nokia and RIM have created hundreds of different models

Just fwiw, you've just made as your argument one of the most classical and basic fallacies -- an appeal to authority.

Re:So the videos are true?

[Moridineas]

I don't have an iPhone 4 nor at the moment a blackberry, but when you say:

Well if they are true, I can't replicate it. My Blackberry for sure has signal variations based on its position. I'm quite sure my body interferes with it too, no way it can't. However it doesn't drop calls when I hold it. I grip with the "whole hand wraparound" method all the time, just how I hold the thing. It always seems to work.

It sounds an awful lot like what many iPhone 4 users have said (including friends I've seen with an iphone4 personally, and, eg, the Anandtech review). If you're in a good reception area, the deathgrip makes you lose some signal but does not automatically drop the call. If you're in a low reception area, you can go all the way down and drop a call.

But if you're in a sold 5-bar area with your blackberry OR iphone, it's very possible that even a substantial drop in reception won't move you from 5 bars.

Also, FWIW with the 4.0.1 firmware I get a solid 1 bar with my iPhone 3gs in my house. I used to occasionally get up to 4 and it would move between 3-4 and then drop down to 1. It's clear I'm in a low reception area. The new firmware seems to do a MUCH better job of properly relaying this information.

Re:So the videos are true?

[diegocg]

Configure your setup properly. I can see the videos, and I'm using Fedora...

Re:So the videos are true?

[awyeah]

Honestly... my old Nokia 6200 had killer reception. Probably the best reception I have had with AT&T (or Cingular, or whatever their name was that day).

Re:So the videos are true?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. Your wife is beautiful and fucks like a beast. You see what I did there?

Re:So the videos are true?

[wish bot]

A moment of sanity, thank you. It's amazing how low Slashdot has fallen when a post like this has to actually be written.

Re:So the videos are true?

[notknown86]

It is like Starbucks getting into the light bulb industry and telling GE they're doing it wrong. It isn't worth dignifying with a response.

If Apple got into the light bulb business, they'd probably test their light bulbs using special lampshades to prevent anyone from seeing their "brilliant" design before Jobs delivered it in one of his awesome, mind-blowing "presentations". Never realising that dimness of the light was not an effect of lampshade, but of the big hulking Apple symbol on the bulb itself.

One more thing: it would sell like hotcakes, because even dimmer than the bulb are the Apple faithful who favour form over function.

Re:So the videos are true?

[noidentity]

Repeat after me: the signal bars don't tell you the absolute signal level, just relative, and the scale is merely monotonic, nothing more. Two signal bars might be a miniscule increase over one, while three might be twice the signal. And it can differ across phones.

Re:So the videos are true?

[Sycraft-fu]

Well the reason I suspect Apple does have a bigger problem is twofold:

1) This only came up with iPhone 4s. Nobody seemed to have a problem before now. Coincidence? Maybe but unlikely. Goes double since the people showing this off and who found it are Apple fans in general. They were the ones who preordered, who stood in line for hours, etc. It doesn't seem to be BB fanboys who get an iPhone 4 just to try and show it sucks. There seems to be a much higher incidence of trouble with this design.

2) Antenna researchers say it is a problem. One professor at the university I work at had me grab a video of the problem from online for use in a presentation since she has been studying the general problem (creating electrical contact between two points of an antenna of that type) for four years. The iPhone 4 demonstrates the problem she is looking at, apparently, and not anything else.

I'm not saying that getting in the way of an antenna doesn't affect things, I'm saying that the iPhone 4 appears to have problems above and beyond normal phones because of the choice to make the antenna on the surface where you can cause it to conduct from side to side with your hand.

I'd be interested in seeing tests on it, and we do indeed have the means to test it at work (an RF anechoic chamber, a spectrum analyzer and a signal generator) but it would require ripping apart some phones and I don't think anyone is interested in sacrificing theirs.

Re:So the videos are true?

[cynyr]

same here, i'm too lazy to dig up the links to the actual files out of the html source and then make mplayer spoof it's useragent to be quick time. see apple trailer workaround for mplayer.

Re:So the videos are true?

[dangitman]

What videos? All I see is "Get Quicktime".

You're holding it wrong.

Re:So the videos are true?

[Moridineas]

If you read the Anandtech review (who did his testing without anything nifty like an anechoic chamber or any special hardware) he showed that in comparison to an iphone 3gs and several other phones, the iPhone 4 most definitely DOES lose more signal than the others. However Anand also said that the iPhone4 seemed to hold onto calls even with a lesser signal than the iPhone 3gs or other phones (-113 dbm iirc).

And regardless of this--the free case seems to solve the problem. At least I haven't seen people claiming otherwise?

Was it a messup/bug/engineering mistake--absolutely.

Also FWIW, I have tested running SpeedTest with my iPhone 3gs tightly gripping the bottom 1/3 (with a case on). The speed goes down absolutely predictably. From the Apple presentation, youtube videos and other people I've talked to, most phones do indeed have this problem. The iPhone4 seems to have it worse, but nothing a case doesn't solve.

Re:So the videos are true?

[PitaBred]

The problem is that Apple is the only company stupid enough to make the antenna able to be shorted out when you hold it, bridging the antenna. All other phones have completely enclosed antennas that do experience attenuation depending on how you hold them, but nothing to the degree of what Apple's does.

Re:So the videos are true?

[Tablizer]

Isn't that "argument from the masses" rather than authority? Similar, but not identical. It's kind of like, "If the entire village says the earth is flat, then doggone it must be flat!"

Re:So the videos are true?

[olafva]

You are correct. RIM and Nokia have no case, as the videos clearly demonstrate they can
have similar problems to very small number of iPhone4 customers who experience this problem.
The missing message from the distorted press was that this is NOT a significant problem
for most iPhone4, RIM or Nokia customers, but was blown out of context with all the iPhone hype.

Re:So the videos are true?

[Anonymous Coward]

> you've just made as your argument one of the most classical and basic fallacies -- an appeal to authority.

Though in this case the poster's appeal is not fallacious as Nokia have direct and demonstrable experience in the field being discussed.

A fallacious example would be, for example, saying "Stephen Hawking says that Nokia phones hold their signals." Stephen Hawking being an authoritive figure in his domain, but not being an RF engineer and specifically not an antenna designer.

Can you explain how you believed that poster's argument to be fallacious?

Re:So the videos are true?

[Anonymous Coward]

And appealing to authority doesn't automatically make your argument untrue, it just makes it fallacious. Unless you have some kind of a counter claim to prove his original argument/statement wrong, pointing out fallacies doesn't really add much to a conversation.
 
Just FWIW.

Re:So the videos are true?

[Moridineas]

I like Drinkypoo's explanation in this thread.

The argument that someone has done something more necessarily means they are better at it is a logical fallacy, and the fallacy is appeal to authority. They are an authority because they do it a lot, right? By that logic McDonalds should build a better burger.

Re:So the videos are true?

[Tablizer]

McD's probably builds the most consistent burger. Whether it's experience or not is another matter.

Re:So the videos are true?

[Moridineas]

Since you obviously didn't read the post to which I replied, let me excerpt the relevant sections:

They don't need to give more of a response because while Apple has created a few phones Nokia and RIM have created hundreds of different models from the stupid to the very cutting edge smart phone. ... It isn't worth dignifying with a response.

Fallacious. Couldn't be simpler. There IS no argument to rebut other than the statement that because Nokia and RIM are authorities they don't need to even respond to any potential criticism.

Re:So the videos are true?

[Moridineas]

Since you obviously didn't read the post to which I replied, let me excerpt the relevant sections:

They don't need to give more of a response because while Apple has created a few phones Nokia and RIM have created hundreds of different models from the stupid to the very cutting edge smart phone. ... It isn't worth dignifying with a response.

Fallacious. There IS no argument to rebut other than the statement that because Nokia and RIM are authorities they don't need to even respond to any potential criticism.

Re:So the videos are true?

[Moridineas]

Doesn't follow. McDonalds can make a technically consistent burger while also making a crappy burger. (I don't want to get into an argument over burgers as this is veering far offtopic)...

The point is that when the original poster said:

They don't need to give more of a response because while Apple has created a few phones Nokia and RIM have created hundreds of different models from the stupid to the very cutting edge smart phone. ... It isn't worth dignifying with a response.

That's a fallacious argument. Saying Nokia and RIM don't even need to respond to criticism because in the past they've made hundreds of phones? Ludicrous.

Intel has made hundreds of CPUs, but they have to respond to criticism. Toyota has made thousands of cars and they have to respond to criticism. And so on.

Re:So the videos are true?

[Mr Bubble]

They aren't stupid. Whatever antennae they end up with will be copied by all the other manufacturers in short order. The antennae design is superior than other antennas in most situations, but worse in a small range of situations where the signal is really low and the user is holding his phone aggressively. People in higher signal areas claim the reception is better.

Re:So the videos are true?

[PitaBred]

As soon as everyone has great service everywhere they go, I'll agree with you. Until that point, Apple is stupid.

Re:Erm...

[compro01]

I think you read that wrong. He was saying they don't include many options because they [the options] are too complicated.

Re:Erm...

[Anonymous Coward]

[x] simplicity: trying to make a design with no antenna protruding by putting it on the outer edge of the phone
[x] complicated: telling users to perform hand acrobatics (i.e. hold it different) to make a call on a damn phone
[ ] telling truth: Steve Jobs

Problem only with US networks?

[Anonymous Coward]

As far as I've read, the 3G problems will unlikely manifest in countries/places with good 3G coverage. For example, it's been said that US 3G coverage is lagging 5-6 years behind the 3G coverage of northern Europe.

I don't know about you guys in the US, but I probably don't even drop one phonecall per year here in Scandinavia. Apple is gonna have a major headache on their hand with the consumer authorities if their phones are shown to drop any amount of phonecalls.

Re:Problem only with US networks?

[Spad]

This is something that has always amazed me; that US carriers boast about "only" dropping between 1% and 2% of calls; that doesn't seem like much, but when you're looking at the kind of scales that we're talking about with mobile phone calls it really is.

In the UK, dropped calls just aren't an issue unless you're a) Using an iPhone in the middle of London or b) You're in one of the increasingly few coverage black-spots for your network.

It's pretty simple.

[v(*_*)vvvv]

Consumer report couldn't have illustrated it simpler. You put your finger *here* and the signal strength drops by 15 to 20% or whatever the number was.

There really isn't much mystery. If the signal is strong, then 20% isn't going to change anything. But people generally move around in the same areas, so if your activites are concentrated in a dodgy signal area, that means your calls could go from a 25% drop rate to completely unusable.

Re:It's pretty simple.

[Cheech Wizard]

Consumer Reports did abbreviated tests and did not do any comprehensive tests or any significant comparison tests. They admitted it. They said they have to do further testing. Consumer reports did what they did for their own self promotion. I used to read Consumer Reports but they went to hell in a hand basket years ago.

Re:It's pretty simple.

[Anonymous Coward]

No, I actually tried it in the store. On SOME iPhone 4s putting your finger there does nothing. On other iPhone 4s putting your finger there and SQUEEZING INCREDIBLY HARD will reproduce the problem. Just touching it? No - at least I sure couldn't get it to happen.

Perhaps is has something to do with skin moisture.

Re:It's pretty simple.

[Anonymous Coward]

IIRC it was a 20dB drop in signal strength. dB != %. 3dB drop is equivalent to half power, 20dB is 1/100 the power level AKA the signal strength drops by 99%.
Otherwise you are correct though. If you are in a strong signal area even a loss of 20dB won't result in a dropped call.

Re:It's pretty simple.

[noidentity]

Consumer report couldn't have illustrated it simpler. You put your finger *here* and the signal strength drops by 15 to 20% or whatever the number was.

What is this Consumer Report and Consumers Report I keep reading about? Two recent Slashdot summaries have referred to it, and yet another reference.

Re:It's pretty simple.

[Jason Pollock]

There is a magazine in the US, consumerreports.org. They perform independent product testing. The magazine is fully subscriber supported and (as far as I know) doesn't accept any advertising. They don't event accept free products for testing - they go out and buy them retail.

So, when they review a product, I tend to listen. Sometimes they aren't as indepth as you'd like, but that is visible because they also detail their testing methodologies.

There are various other organisations that follow the same format in other countries. I don't know if they are all affiliated. Here in NZ, there is consumer.org.nz.

Re:It's pretty simple.

[moortak]

It is nonprofit magazine that researches products. They are a pretty big deal to a rather hefty chunk of the buying public and chose to not recommend the new Iphone because of these issues.

Re:It's pretty simple.

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't realize it was unnecessarily pedantic day today.

Re:It's pretty simple.

[nahdude812]

I was asking about Consumer Report and Consumers Report, not Consumer Reports. I keep seeing these referenced yet have never heard of them before.

Not sure if I'm just feeding a troll here, but the former two, at least in the context where we're talking about their iPhone 4 test results, are simply misspellings of Consumer Reports.

Re:It's pretty simple.

[noidentity]

I don't think I was trolling. It would be like calling the company Apples, Inc. or the newspaper the New York Time.

Being unnecessarily pedantic would be correcting someone using the term Driver's License (at least in Texas, where it's properly called a Driver License), or referring to Daylight Savings Time.

Re:It's pretty simple.

[webdog314]

Ah yes, was this the same Consumer Reports that initially called the iPhone 4 the 'best phone in the world'? So much for their 'extensive testing' if they couldn't even spot a major flaw in the device that was pointed out not fifteen minutes after release by the general public.

Re:It's pretty simple.

[dave024]

I can make the signal drop to one bar in some locations just by touching that spot. No hard squeezing needed. Not only does the signal drop but all data transfer stops as well, though calls can be made. It depends on how strong the signal is to start with. If the signal is strong to start you won't notice a problem when touching the spot, squeeizing hard, etc. (I just avoid the problem by not touching the phone there, though I also started using a bumper case as well)

Re:Erm...

[ThoughtMonster]

I think he meant to say that user options make a product too complicated.

To paraphrase Bjarne Stroustrup:

"An organisation that treats its users as morons will soon have users that are willing and able to act like morons only."

Nokia and RIM Respond To Apple's Antenna Claims

[omar.sahal]

Meanwhile, Nokia, noting that they are pioneers in antenna design and were the first company to bring to market a phone with an internal antenna, prioritizes 'antenna performance over physical design if they are ever in conflict.'"

Och! This hits the nail on the head. The original Apple Macintosh used to over heat because it did not have a fan! Why did it not have a fan, because Jobs wanted a quiet machine.
To be far though the case was designed to keep the machine cool and it worked, but there was a problem with the hardware running hotter than it should. Even the circuit board/mother board (don't flame me if I got the terminology wrong I'm no computer engineer) had to be redesigned to look pretty because Jobs wanted it that way. The man has form!

Re:Nokia and RIM Respond To Apple's Antenna Claims

[jmichaelg]

It's true that Apple ranks style very high and Nokia are noted for their antenna skills.

However I am not convinced that Nokia "prioritizes 'antenna performance over physical design if they are ever in conflict.'" It's my understanding that the old rod-style antennas perform better than the now common internal antennas. The antennas disappeared into the phone to gain style points, not to improve overall reception.

Perhaps an RF engineer could comment?

Re:Nokia and RIM Respond To Apple's Antenna Claims

[omar.sahal]

This is not really about Nokia, its about Apple. Old rod-style antennas are ugly and cumbersome, I would trade that for slightly worse internal antennas, if that's the trade-of. As I said Steve Jobs has form for design related issues that can backfire, this has been covered at www.folklore.org a site written by people who know and have worked closely with Jobs. Having said this I would rather have a CEO like Jobs, I don't want to fault the man for caring about his products.

Re:Nokia and RIM Respond To Apple's Antenna Claims

[tftp]

The antennas disappeared into the phone to gain style points, not to improve overall reception. Perhaps an RF engineer could comment?

Primarily you need a manufacturing engineer to comment on this. External antennas are large, expensive to make, and they tend to break, and you must depend on the customer to extend them (if they are extendable.) But from the RF point of view, a well designed and well matched internal antenna is not any worse than an external one. The technology of antennas has also improved, CST came up with specialized simulators and models, new LNAs are now available to increase sensitivity, and so on.

Re:Nokia and RIM Respond To Apple's Antenna Claims

[Anonymous Coward]

If you look at the Wikipedia article regarding the subject (too lazy to find it on my own at the moment, it was posted and I read it a week ago) you'll read that in the end they figured out that it was in fact NOT a problem with not having a fan, but the process in which the main board was manufactured.

Re:Nokia and RIM Respond To Apple's Antenna Claims

[Drew M.]

As a person who was completely obsessed with maintaining cell reception, I did a ton of testing of cell phones on Verizon. I can say that the Nokias were always the best at holding calls in fringe areas, even the models with internal antennas like the 6236i. All the Nokias I owned would actually gain very little signal strength (1-2db) by extending their antenna. I read that part of their design was to be able to use the external antenna internally or externally. 2nd best was usually Motorola. There were definitely times where other Verizon users had to borrow my phone to maintain a call. When Nokias were dropped by Verizon I would go pick up used ones as backups. All in all, I owned 1 3589i, 3 6015i, and a 6236i, every single candybar style Nokia that Verizon carried near the end.

Testing done by others on Sprint would place the Nokias as the best followed by Sanyo. This was confirmed by many users on howardforums and by an internal Sprint engineer that had access to call drop data.

Re:Nokia and RIM Respond To Apple's Antenna Claims

[yyxx]

When companies learned to achieve the same performance as rod-style antennas with internal antennas, that's when mainstream phones switched. Many companies still have phones with external antennas for those who need them.

But actually, internal antennas have one big performance advantage over rod-style antennas: you can't touch them, which is why they are probably a better choice for consumer phones. Even with external antennas, companies have tried hard to cover them up with plastic to keep people from touching them.

Re:Nokia and RIM Respond To Apple's Antenna Claims

[Dragoniz3r]

I wish I could find a source on this, but I believe your understanding is flawed. Infact, if memory serves me, I've seen that Nokia was the company that went to great engineering lengths to make internal antennas that were as good as external ones, and also to convince everyone of it.

My memory may be flawed, so don't crucify me if I'm wrong, but I believe that is what I have seen in the past.

Re:Nokia and RIM Respond To Apple's Antenna Claims

[Anonymous Coward]

You are correct, the old rod style seriously out-performs the newer embedded antennas.

That's what makes Nokia's statement so fucking hilarious: it's demonstrably false just by looking at.. oh.. almost EVERY Nokia phone.

Re:Nokia and RIM Respond To Apple's Antenna Claims

[tylerni7]

(Note: IANARFE)
There is a difference between prioritizing antenna performance over physical design, and maximizing antenna performance. Maximizing antenna performance isn't really necessary if the signal is "good enough", meaning you wouldn't drop calls when you hold the phone, for example. Prioritizing would mean "this adjustment would look nicer, but we would start to drop calls if we did it", and they are suggesting those adjustments would not be made.

Also, I believe the older rod antennas would be for the 900MHz spectrum, rather than the more modern 2.4GHz spectrum. You can fit an entire quarter-wave antenna inside of the case of a cell phone easily now (although of course having an antenna that extends above the head to get a clearer signal would still be beneficial)

Re:Nokia and RIM Respond To Apple's Antenna Claims

[Anonymous Coward]

The antennas moved position because the FCC (and various other international bodies) mandated that antennas emitting more than a certain amount of energy could not be placed on the phone such that they would normally be in close contact with the skin... thus antennas are now on the bottom of phones (which is in contact less than the top) and generally embedded to minimize contact.

Re:Nokia and RIM Respond To Apple's Antenna Claims

[Anonymous Coward]

I, too, have zero tolerance for lousy reception, so after 6+ years of using a Nokia 3589i on Verizon, I still swear by it. Along the way I have purchased (no contract) other phones only to return them due to inferior reception. It amazes me that people tolerate dropped calls/lousy reception.

Re:Nokia and RIM Respond To Apple's Antenna Claims

[loose electron]

If you want best signal quality you will have a high gain
dish antenna with an auto alignment system to keep
it aligned with the tower antenna and get the best SNR
performance.

That's going to be a bit bulky and awkward to deal with however.

ALL cell phone antennas are a compromise on usability, compactness
signal strength in transmission, sensitivity to orientation and sensitivity to
close proximity loading (the big sweaty hand syndrome)

And a dozen other things.

The average end user doesn't notice and they don't care until it
affects what they are doing.

Apple Screwed Up - and Jobs doesn't want to show humility.
Old Jobs from 20 years back. Pretty typical for him.

In San Jose, there is a street named for Steve Wozniak (Woz Way downtown)
Nothing there for Steve Jobs.
Woz is well liked by the engineers in Silly Valley - Not so for SJ...

Re:Nokia and RIM Respond To Apple's Antenna Claims

[GumphMaster]

Removing the external protrusion probably substantially reduced the number of phones broken by having the (often permanently attached) antenna snapped off or electrically disconnected thereby bricking the phone. This change is not about a nebulous style issue, it is about product durability.

Re:Nokia and RIM Respond To Apple's Antenna Claims

[Anonymous Coward]

The move to internal antennas did not significantly alter the reception and made the phones handier for transporting inside pockets, for instance. Performance was hardly in conflict with design here.

Re:Nokia and RIM Respond To Apple's Antenna Claims

[AaronW]

I own a Motorola Droid and I tried to replicate the problem the iPhone 4 is experiencing. The antenna is located in the base and at most I could get a 2-3db signal loss by covering the base with my hand, and I had to really work at it to get 3db. A 3db drop is roughly 1/2 the signal strength. A 20db loss (which Consumer Reports shows the iPhone 4 suffers from), is 1/100 the signal strength. To try and say that other phones suffer from the same problem is a cop-out. I also tend to hold phones such that it would kill the signal of an iPhone 4. I imagine it also is affected by how much ones hand conducts, i.e. damp or sweaty. I'm not an antenna expert, but even I realize how stupid it is to make an antenna like Apple's. Touching the antenna will change its impedance and change the wavelength of the antenna significantly. No software can work around that.

Re:Nokia and RIM Respond To Apple's Antenna Claims

[Anonymous Coward]

Internal antennas are not just style points - a phone with an internal antenna is less vulnerable to breakage and easier to handle (eg slipping into a belt holder or pocket) than one with an external rod.

Re:Nokia and RIM Respond To Apple's Antenna Claims

[jansilent]

Too bad s60 is a complete dog, with among many other issues, NO memory protection. That's right, you can even hex-patch other programs in realtime! Leads to some fun side effects, like the phone being prone to rebooting itself during calls. I'm guessing those aren't counted as "drops" here on ATT. Not a fluke either, I have 4 of these POS's. Oh, I can make it drop calls too with a 2-finger grip near the bottom, and I've noticed the 3GS and 4g both hold a signal better (low-reception area) for data usage. Not to mention Nokia's history of offering zero support after purchase (check out the n810, same hw as an iPod touch, no OpenGL drivers because Nokia didn't want to pay $4 per device for drivers for the powervr gpu.... Or for an easier one, look at the number of s60v3 phones that didn't get the "free maps" that they made sure to get SlashVertised). Also, re: RIM being better for business uses, including SIP: How is that so, when there wasn't even a third party SIP stack for the BB until a couple months ago, is still very beta, and only works on certain networks and BB's (GSM with full duplex, which isn't standardized across devices)? RIM themselves don't offer any voip/sip APIs either (and have been against such a thing for YEARS). Lame.

Re:Nokia and RIM Respond To Apple's Antenna Claims

[Anonymous Coward]

I absolutely agree with you re: Nokia's verizon phones having the best reception...

I'm still using a 3589i to this day from 2003 (though I'm now on the 3rd or so)

too bad they don't make them quite like that anymore --> doesn't anyone remember the Nokia E71 (granted, GSM) thin candybar that was also extremely sensitive to touch for its reception?

If I put it in my pocket, the mere act of being next to my skin would make it lose its signal entirely (ie i had to keep it out of my pocket in order to receive calls)

Re:Nokia and RIM Respond To Apple's Antenna Claims

[BitZtream]

a well designed and well matched internal antenna is not any worse than an external one

Bullshit.

Internal antenna's are encased, thats an immediate signal quality drop. Second, they have (in an iPhone) a semimetalic screen on one side and on the other side, while in use, my hand. Both of these things are great at killing a cellphone signal when not PART of the antenna.

Anyone who says internal antenna's are as good as external hasn't taken the device out of the test lab.

Re:Nokia and RIM Respond To Apple's Antenna Claims

[BitZtream]

No, they made internal antenna's work in Europe.

Where you have a cell tower within 200 feet of you 99.99999999999% of the time.

America is an entirely different beast and dropping external antenna's here was a fucking retarded move.

Re:Nokia and RIM Respond To Apple's Antenna Claims

[drinkypoo]

Primarily you need a manufacturing engineer to comment on this. External antennas are large, expensive to make, and they tend to break,

External cellphone antennas do NOT tend to break. They're encased in a big fat lump of plastic to prevent this. The problem is that they are large and ugly.

and you must depend on the customer to extend them (if they are extendable.)

you can get extendable antennas for many phones, but I've NEVER seen a cellphone to come with a telescoping one, only the skinny pull-outs. I'm sure someone can come up with an example from days of yore but it won't make it a good argument.

The technology of antennas has also improved,

Somebody tell apple.

Re:Nokia and RIM Respond To Apple's Antenna Claims

[Damnshock]

That just doesn't make sense. Internal antennaes may have come to a point where the performance is similar to what we had a few years back with external antennaes. However... wouldn't the same internal antenna placed "outside" have better performance? Of course it would.

The main point to ditch (is that word right?) external antenas was:

- They tend to break

Is it that far ago that we don't even remember that many people had an unusable cell phone after six months because they had a broken antenna? Gosh, I'm just 27 and I do remember!

To resume: getting internal antennaes wasn't the best for reception but it was for other things thay are important too :)

Re:Nokia and RIM Respond To Apple's Antenna Claims

[SiChemist]

This is the article at folklore.org that parent was talking about. Pretty amusing.

Won't make a difference

[HockeyPuck]

I personally don't believe that it'll make one difference how many calls the iPhone4 drops; people will still buy the phone. The "cool factor" outweighs the ability to make a phone call. Go back and look at the reviews of the original iPhone, it was always inferior to the other phones on the market, but people stood in lines for hours to buy one.

I have ATT, but with a Samsung Blackjack 1. It's ancient by today's smart phone standards, and I don't get any more dropped calls than anybody else I know. Funny though that we always say iPhone dropped calls are an ATT problem, not an Apple problem. Even now, we've got a million excuses, but when it comes down to it and a call is dropped people blame the carrier.

Re:Won't make a difference

[pspahn]

I'm not so sure. My brother has had an iPhone and was ready to get the new one. He also has an iPad. On a recent trip together, he got to check out my new evo. I got a text a couple days ago... he said he just got the evo. His words, "im tired of Apple's shit."

Re:Won't make a difference

[ninjakoala]

This is just anecdotal evidence of course, but I've never had my iPhone 3G drop a call. Not once. It's only been used in Denmark and Norway, though.

But - and this is rather interesting - my previous provider was having some trouble, where suddenly I couldn't make calls at all or use data. When I switched to an older phone (Sony-Ericsson W810i) I could eventually get a lock on the signal, but data was still a no go. Making calls was a hit and miss affair. When I switched to an old black/white Nokia (1112 I believe), it acted like you would expect. Driving to the next town I'd have no problems on any of the phones. I switched provider and have had no problems since.

In other words it seems like if a network has issues, they will be amplified by the complexity of the phone.

Re:Won't make a difference

[Anonymous Coward]

What if it doesn't actually drop calls, though? My iPhone 4 doesn't, and I haven't heard a single person who actually uses one say that they've managed to death-grip their signal into actual call droppage. So what does that make all this noise if not the media biting back at a company that's held its leash a little too tightly for the last decade?

Re:Won't make a difference

[MacGyver2210]

It's completely an AT&T problem, because it happens on all phones on their network. They have weak coverage. They even know this, which is why their commercials are "Fastest 3G network" instead of "Best coverage". Fast 3G doesn't do you much good if you can't connect to it.

Two of my immediate family have iPhones, two other have simple flip-phones on AT&T, and I use a Droid on Verizon. We were having pretty much the same argument, and so we watched our phone signal while driving along the coast. At any given point, the AT&T phones were about 20-40% signal strength, while my phone had 70-100% almost the whole way. Their 3G coverage would drop in and out constantly, yet even when stopped in a tunnel in Boston my Pandora and Google Maps/Navigation didn't cut out when they had no signal at all.

Their network is garbage. It seems like looking at an AT&T phone wrong will make it drop signal.

Re:Won't make a difference

[Anonymous Coward]

The reason people blame AT&T for iPhone dropped calls is that iPhone users outside America don't seem to have the same problems. Antennagate is largely a US phenomenon. What is different between Europe (no problems) and USA (calls dropping like flies)? The network.

I can't understand why Apple have stuck with their exclusivity deal. Maybe this spate of bad publicity will be what it takes to persuade them to let someone more reliable have a go.

Re:Won't make a difference

[danomac]

I also have an iPhone 3G and in two years it's only dropped one call. I use it quite a bit for work-related calling as well.

Re:Won't make a difference

[zyzko]

In other words it seems like if a network has issues, they will be amplified by the complexity of the phone.

Yes, this whole "dropped calls" issue seems to be very US specific. I don't know what is wrong with AT&T and other US carriers - here in Finland since NMT (old analog standard) times I have never, ever had a "dropped call" which wasn't an issue with dead battery or simply losing coverage eg. in a train going to a tunnel. Not even when traveling and skiing in the Alps where I can be in 3 countries in the same day a few kilometer apart I've had zero problems. I know that magazines still test the reception of the phones and it is all good - the function must not be sacrified to form or anything else. But it still puzzles me that it seems anywhere I go in Europe there is near-perfect reception everywhere (well, GSM/Edge, 3G in rural areas is not common everywhere) and zero dropped calls. What is so different with US?

Re:Won't make a difference

[awyeah]

Seriously? Where are you using it? I have a 3GS and it drops more calls than my BlackBerry did. Not very many more... but definitely more.

Re:Won't make a difference

[Anonymous Coward]

Some journalists and TV presenters in Europe have the iPhone for the coolness factor and a Nokia for making actual calls.

Re:Erm...

[feuerfalke]

He means that Apple leaves out these options because they're too complicated for the average Apple user. (Reading comprehension: you should work on it)

Re:Erm...

[frosty_tsm]

Apple has and always will be a company that prioritizes looks and simplicity over function. It's the same reason their products have almost no user options. They are too complicated. They force you to use the product the way they want you to.

+1 Excellent use of bold.

Ha ha ha

[Anonymous Coward]

You notice how they are clever to not dispute the actual fact that Apples tests were right?

Re:Ha ha ha

[MachDelta]

Well of course it's possible to interfere with the antenna from a phone. The issue here is how easy it is to do (accidentally) and how severe the effect is.

To use a car analogy, this is like if Lexus made an SUV that was prone to oversteer and rollovers during normal driving, and their response (instead of a recall) was "yeah well you can make any SUV roll over! It's a universal problem! See!" followed by a professional driver performing crazy stunts in order to flip some other manufacturers vehicle.

One is likely to happen accidentally, and one is much less so.

HTC Benelux response

[Animaether]

Mark Moons of HTC Benelux posted his response to twitter.
source: http://tweakers.net/nieuws/68622/mobieltjesmakers-reageren-fel-op-antennevergelijking-van-apple.html
( the comment threads there are a lovely Apple vs The World whinefest )

Translated (Google fails due to colloquial word usage)
"Is Jobs yacking about the reception on competing devices to justify his own design error? I must seeing it wrong*"
( * "I must be misinterpreting", though that would typically be written as "Ik zal het wel verkeerd begrijpen")
http://twitter.com/markmoons/status/18702074270

"....ok, stopped following that fruitlet's sobstory.... got better things to do... he's denigrating the industry."
http://twitter.com/markmoons/status/18702370046

Re:HTC Benelux response

[drinkypoo]

I have an HTC Fuze (Raphael for AT&T) with a keyboard cable problem. It's a known problem you can solve with electrical tape. HTC does not do this, continually kicking out a phone they knew has a problem which will happen to all units eventually. It's hard to take HTC seriously when they put out known lemons and provide no customer recourse, and further don't fix a problem they know how to fix. In fact it's hard to believe that they would do this for any reason other than to potentially generate new sales, because it is so stupid and incompetent.

damage controle

[luther349]

apple is in damage control mode. as nokia said trying to shift the damage away from there defective phone. i have a old original blackberry and it works in spots the iphone does not. seems odd a 10 year old smart phone smokes your supposed new design.

Re:damage controle

[asdf7890]

Not that I wish to defend Apple here (from what I gather there *is* a problem, and while it may not be massive it is seems significant enough for many people to notice even after discounting obvious group-think and multiple re-reporting of the same unverified facts), but what your old smart phone is doing a lot less then the new iPhone. The receiving equipment for 1G/2G reception that the old blackberry is using is sharing the phone case and it's power supply lines with far far less potentially interfering equipment then the iPhone: the receiving equipment and circuitry for 3G reception (which will be online even if no reception is possible at that location so the phone can switch over as soon as adequate reception is detected), the fancy screen, the extra RAM, and so on. It is not unlikely that the iPhone is essentially interfering with itself more then the old Blackberry does, and that other new smartphones with similar capabilities to the iPhone would also be less capable of dealing with seriously borderline compared to the old Blackberry.

Re:damage controle

[luther349]

that may be true but both rim and nokia said if they see theirs going to be a reception issue with there device they redesign it. usability over look. my old school blackberry may be a old school 2 pound brick but it works granted a new battery. and it never drooped a call when it has a strong single. you can put all the fancy gear inside a phone but if you brake its core feature being a phone whats the point. my brothers new gen phone drops calls all the frigging time. im not saying go buy a 10 year old blackberry couse it works better im saying if theirs a issue it should be fixed before it hits the stores that's what testing is for.

Re:damage controle

[asdf7890]

For some of the people I know, and possibly many others, the making of calls has actually become a secondary function of their phones. Music, video, GPS and route planning, and maybe make/receive a call or two in an emergency. So perhaps the manufacturers of smart phones are prioritising their testing similarly. I'm talking as an outsider though - my nearly-four-year-old Nokia mini-brick format phone (a 6233, FYI) still serves me well and taking calls/texts is still its primary function.

one theory

[z-j-y]

one theory says that since iPhone4 makes antenna design, especially the gap, so prominent, it is far easier for people to correlate signal quality with hand position.

on other phones, even if the same problem exists, it is very difficult for people to discover, because the antenna is internal. drop of signal is so common, you just won't think too much about it.

the lesson is, if you have a design flaw, obfuscate it so that people can't easily identify the cause.

Re:one theory

[tftp]

one theory says that since iPhone4 makes antenna design, especially the gap, so prominent, it is far easier for people to correlate signal quality with hand position.

People (and animals) are amazingly good in sensing their hand position. If a phone tends to fail with a hand in some specific position it would be unavoidably noticed, given that billions of calls are placed daily. Also the gap between iPhone antennas is not something people would even notice, unless it marks the trouble spot.

The reason that other phones work and the iPhone 4 doesn't is, IMO, because the signal drop in other phones is very small - small enough to stay under the radar, just as intended. There was no such complaint about earlier iPhones either - simply because they behaved reasonably enough.

on other phones, even if the same problem exists, it is very difficult for people to discover, because the antenna is internal.

It's damn easy to discover if your call is dropped when you grip the phone exactly *there*. If this is not discovered on other phones it's only because the calls aren't dropped, and then there is no problem.

drop of signal is so common, you just won't think too much about it.

If the loss of the signal is small then I don't care. If the loss is so large that a perfectly good call gets disconnected then it's clearly a problem.

Re:one theory

[z-j-y]

how many hand positions you use when making calls? one.

Re:one theory

[tftp]

how many hand positions you use when making calls? one.

At least two, since I have two hands. Besides, what is the chance that out of 100,000,000 cell phone users all of them use exactly the same position? And if some positions are never tried by anyone, nobody would care if holding the phone there affects the signal.

This is exactly now the iPhone 4 problem was discovered - by lefties that held the phone in a natural, very common way.

Re:one theory

[bm_luethke]

I suppose this would be true if I were able to somehow pass my finger through the plastic/metal and somehow make an electrical contact with my phones antenna, but since I can't that particular theory is really stupid. You are going to loose signal strength the more the signal has to pass true - that is absolutely true - however other phones do not have antenna's detune by creating an electrical contact between them. So, yes all phones "suffer" from loss of strength due to holding the phone but the iPhone has a *second* (and much more severe) issue with shorting a gap between two of its antennas.

Jobs knows his market VERY well, give them enough somewhat technical sounding things and they will find a way to rationalize it away. It happens in many fields, I generally refer to it as a "Throw a dog a bone syndrome" - you can take a dog, beat it to near death, starve it most of the time, abuse it how you want but give it the occasional bone and it will bound about just as happy as all get out to see you. Jobs knows how to throw his market a bone and they respond accordingly.

It isn't a revolutionary change nor an evolutionary change - there is a reason other phone manufacturers do not do this and it isn't some conspiracy due to trying to hide signal drop. It is the simple fact it is horrible design as it causes a noticeable percentage of signal attenuation if held incorrectly. Apples own engineer told them, other engineers told them, heck people talked about it here on slashdot ever since it was announced it would work this way. Apple went ahead and it turns out that people who have been doing RF for decades may actually know what they were talking about. But then why should Apple change too? We can see all it took to make their customer base was a few minute long talk about how everyone else sucks and they are still the bestest most smartest people on the planet for having one.

Re:one theory

[Anonymous Coward]

on other phones, even if the same problem exists, it is very difficult for people to discover, because the antenna is internal.

You can say that again. I spent a good five minutes last night trying out different hand positions on my Droid. Steady 5 bars of signal. I couldn't make it drop whatever I did.

Maybe it helps that Verizon has more than three cell towers per state.

Re:one theory

[PitaBred]

The thing is, your body attenuates the signal to any phone, doesn't matter which one. It's just how things work. The problem with the Apple phone is that it's antenna can be contacted by a bare hand, which MASSIVELY increases the interference as compared to simply just having a body part in the general way of the signal like most internal antenna phones.

Your math has problems

[Elfich47]

Just because issue A has a 1% incidence rate and issue B rate a 1.4% incidence rate does not necessarily mean that A+B = 2.4% incidence rate. How many of those incidence overlap or not?

Re:Your math has problems

[RedK]

Is math is dead on, Steve said that the 1% was a delta, he said "1 out of 100 more". You just completely misunderstood, which I think is part of why Steve presented it the way he did. To make it sound like 1%, when it actuality it's 1% more than some unknown number which is now said to be 1.4%.

Re:Your math has problems

[LBArrettAnderson]

Actually... you seem to either not understand the available facts or math in general. "http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/16/apple-iphone-4-drops-less-than-one-additional-call-per-100-tha/ ). How are you interpreting that?

Re:Your math has problems

[PopeRatzo]

Steve said...why Steve presented...

I'm loving the first-name basis. The lack of self-consciousness over using the first name of a CEO of a consumer electronics company that you buy stuff from is part of what makes Apple fans endearing.

Re:Your math has problems

[RedK]

Uh ? That's his name and it's easier to write than Mr. Jobs. I wouldn't write Mr. Ellison either, I'd say Larry. Nor would I say Mr. Schmidt, I'd just say Eric or Mr. Schwartz, Jo, Jon, Jonathan... And what in my comment makes you think I'm an Apple fan ? I'm actually saying he was purposefully manipulating statistics to make it seem less bad than it was...

Re:Your math has problems

[Elfich47]

The issue I am trying to state is this: AT&T drop rate is 1.4%. Is that for the entire fleet of phones currently in service? Is that for just the iPhone 3Gs? Is that for the iPhone4? These are significantly different populations to be looking at. We have two statements: "AT&T drop rate is 1.4% " and "Iphone 4 drops more calls than iphone 3Gs at a rate less than 1 per 100" Unfortunately we do not have a way of determining how these two pieces of information correlate. Without knowing the total fleet drop drop rate and the drop rate of the specific phones we cannot have any clear analysis of the numbers.

Re:Your math has problems

[Aboroth]

Personally, I'd call him by some kind of respectable title if he had one, and I'd call him by his last name if I had respect for him.

Re:Your math has problems

[Anonymous Coward]

Many Mac users refer to Steve Jobs as "Steve".

Re:Your math has problems

[trentblase]

Dear MY FIRST NAME, You are scheduled for a Genius Bar appointment.

If Apple is fine communicating with me on a first name basis, then turnabout is fair play.

Re:Your math has problems

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally, I'd call him by some kind of respectable title if he had one, and I'd call him by his last name if I had respect for him.

What, "The Savior Of Man" isn't respectable enough for you? Pfft. I'm certain the Chosen Faithful have better ones for His Exaltedness.

Re:Your math has problems

[jc42]

Steve said...why Steve presented...

I'm loving the first-name basis.

In some circles, he's known as "The Steve".

Re:Your math has problems

[masmullin]

those in the know (aka the coolest of the cool kids) call him "SteveyJ" Used in a sentence: "Hey SteveJ, hows the drop call rate bro!"

Re:Your math has problems

[santiagodraco]

Of course what they don't tell you, or probably don't know, is how many calls are ended intentionally because you are unintelligible to the person on the other end of the line. I've had a bunch of calls where I've had to hang up and call back on a land line because the person could not understand me when I "accidentally" rested my skin against the black line.

Re:Your math has problems

[beelsebob]

he said "less than" ...

Re:Your math has problems

[Anonymous Coward]

your also forgetting the 1.4% is all phone models on all at&t customers... Not just iphone users... I would imagine iphone users have a much much higher number...

Re:Your math has problems

[jo_ham]

Er, it's his name?

What else would people call him?

In an informal internet forum do you expect people to type "Mr Jobs" or "Apple CEO, Steven Jobs", or just "The CEO". Even if you have to declare a subject once so you can witch to pronouns, "Steve" is a succinct and accurate representation that is better than his full name.

It's this sort of desperate baiting on silly issues by Apple haters that makes them so endearing. It's almost cute, as long as someone keeps wiping the froth from their neckbeards.

Re:Your math has problems

[Anonymous Coward]

He didn't forget that at all. In fact, the very first thing he stated in his post was that he was unclear as to exactly what the 1.4% refers to, and his very first option was "entire fleet of phones currently in service".

Re:Your math has problems

[PopeRatzo]

Er, it's his name?

It may be generational. Common English usage usually requires last names be used when referring to someone you don't know personally, and only then when talking to someone who also knows them personally.

Of course, it might be completely different for fans of Apple, who all believe they have a meaningful personal relationship with the CEO of Apple. Or it might just be that the rules of English usage may have changed in the last few weeks and I didn't notice because I missed Jobs' press conference declaring the change.

Re:Your math has problems

[PopeRatzo]

"Steve" is a succinct and accurate representation that is better than his full name.

"Jobs" is more succinct and more precise. Also, it's proper English usage.

Re:Your math has problems

[Anonymous Coward]

His math is dead on, The Arsehole who thought 64K was enough for a desktop computer said that the 1% was a delta, he said "1 out of 100 more". You just completely misunderstood, which I think is part of why Steve presented it the way he did. To make it sound like 1%, when it actuality it's 1% more than some unknown number which is now said to be 1.4%.

Is that better?

Nokia 8210

[gtada]

I had a Nokia 8210 a long time ago. Granted it's ancient history, but that phone was definitely sensitive to how you held it. If you touched the top of the phone, the signal strength dropped dramatically. Haven't had a Nokia since.

I'm just sayin'... I've experienced similar antenna issues in other brands... looking at you, Nokia.

Re:Nokia 8210

[R3d M3rcury]

If you touched the top of the phone, the signal strength dropped dramatically.

I would have no problem believing this. The question is, how often do you touch the top of your phone?

Obviously, other phones have this problem. Not only did Jobs show video of this, you can find plenty of examples of it on YouTube. The problem is that that Apple put the antenna where it is more likely, just through holding the phone in a "normal" fashion, that you will end up affecting the antenna.

Re:Video Proof

[Anonymous Coward]

Facepalm...

The fact is that people can make it happen with the tip of their finger, while they can only make a similar thing happen to other phones by covering most of it. The question was asked about how the issues are different, and Bob didn't answer. Obviously they are different issues, but Apple is trying to get the world to believe that they are one and the same. Also, if they were caused by the same issue, why does covering the antenna (like other phones do with the standard casing) with a bumper solve it?

about Nokia's responce

[dnaumov]

"As you would expect from a company focused on connecting people, we prioritize antenna performance over physical design if they are ever in conflict."

Judging by how Nokia phones look, must be a lot of conflicts.

Re:about Nokia's responce

[robus]

Gruber, is that you?

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/07/17/nokia

Re:Video Proof

[Cheech Wizard]

If you're going to use the term "severe", you might want to cite some numbers. From everything I'm reading it's a minor issue. I don't own an iPhone and and have no intention of buying one so I don't have a dog in this fight, but without actual numbers / comparisons using the word 'severe' is simply inflammatory, unfounded rhetoric.

The IPhone Cult!!

[Pewpdaddy]

As always any Iphone users will vehemently deny that anything is wrong with their beloved device. Though it may be true that other phones have similar issues. I for one do not believe they are as bad as the Iphone 4. I do love the deflection though. Another funny tidbit, the Iphone 4G(eneration) is only a 3g phone. =] Some marketing there Steve-O. You get a cookie. In my personal anyone with an Iphone will call you crazy should you decide to switch to a different device. Even if it's marginally better ... cough Evo 4G. =] I do not have an Evo by the way just look at the capabilities of each. =p http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FL7yD-0pqZg

Re:The IPhone Cult!!

[Moridineas]

As always any Iphone users will vehemently deny that anything is wrong with their beloved device.

Who exactly has claimed this?

Though it may be true that other phones have similar issues. I for one do not believe they are as bad as the Iphone 4.

See also: Given Truth, the Misinformed Believe Lies More

Another funny tidbit, the Iphone 4G(eneration) is only a 3g phone. =]

I think you're being confused by something -- the name of the phone is "iPhone 4" -- note the lowercase i and no G (you mistakenly added the G in). It's called this because it's the 4th iphone. Difficult, I know =]

In my personal anyone with an Iphone will call you crazy should you decide to switch to a different device.

I'm not sure what you mean, but in all of these conversations, the only people I see insulting other people for their choice in phones are non-iphone users. Could you point me to some example?

Re:The IPhone Cult!!

[dnaumov]

There is no need to deny anything. The whole thing is simply blown out of proportion to the extremeties. Yes, the antenna issue is very much real. What is also real is that it only affects (in a noticable way) those who live in bad coverage areas AND insist on holding the phone in a specific way AND refuse to get a bumper. That's a lot of IFs.

Re:The IPhone Cult!!

[Anonymous Coward]

As usual people that don't have one will tell people that do their phone doesn't work.

Re:The IPhone Cult!!

[Pewpdaddy]

Many of my friends and users have dropped the iPhone to the "what?!?" "why, whats the matter with you?!?" of their fellow iPhone users. The 4G is indeed the 4th generation, 4th iteration of the phone. You are correct Apple has not tagged it with the 4G monicker. However, the 4th G(eneration) as I put it is quite convenient. Call it what you will, iPhone users typically shun any other model/device because it "isn't an iPhone". Also I apologize for the mis capitalization. I did my best with grammar, the Apple trademark can eat my shorts. =] Though it does seem to be taking over the world. See iPad. =] I'm going to go ahead and assume you have one since you are so "vehemently" defending it. Apple posted a number of Antenna Engineer positions just before the phone came out. Coincidence? I think not. And as usual you can blame the media for the 4G monicker, don't blame me for the sheeple's misconception. I'm simply giving Jobs kudos for pulling the wool over their eyes. Just like his statement that all phones have the exact same problem. Also in reference to not having one and coveting their wonderous device. I simply refuse to pay the difference. I'll happily save my 360 dollars a year. If I want to get on the internet, I have one of 3 laptops or 2 desktops to do so. A few links of the media skewing the iPhone as a 4G device. http://hubpages.com/hub/The-NEW-iPhone-4G-Coming-2010 http://www.gadgetsdna.com/10-reasons-not-to-buy-next-iphone-4g-hd/2757/

Re:The IPhone Cult!!

[Pewpdaddy]

What is real is that they knowingly released the phone with said issues. And are now denying them.

Re:The IPhone Cult!!

[Moridineas]

Many of my friends and users have dropped the iPhone to the "what?!?" "why, whats the matter with you?!?" of their fellow iPhone users

Ok, so some iPhone users switch to other phones. Check.

The 4G is indeed the 4th generation, 4th iteration of the phone. You are correct Apple has not tagged it with the 4G monicker. However, the 4th G(eneration) as I put it is quite convenient

Did you miss the point? What you said doesn't make any sense at all... That's like saying Firefox 3g is false advertising because it's really not a 3g device. Well, yeah, of COURSE, but since nobody ever called Firefox "firefox 3g" it's also completely irrelevant. Nobody except you is claiming anything about the iphone 4 and 4g? I just don't get it?

Call it what you will, iPhone users typically shun any other model/device because it "isn't an iPhone".

Aggghh, my head -- you just claimed that "many" of your friends and others users had dropped the iPhone. But now you say "iPhone users" shun all other devices. Ow, the illogic hurts me!

I'm going to go ahead and assume you have one since you are so "vehemently" defending it.

I do have an iPhone (3gs), yes. If one link, one statement of fact, and 2 questions are "vehemently" defending, then I think you might want to reevaluate your understanding of the word vehement!

Apple posted a number of Antenna Engineer positions just before the phone came out. Coincidence?

I thought they were opened after the iPhone4 came out? Not sure.

And as usual you can blame the media for the 4G monicker, don't blame me for the sheeple's misconception.

So who, exactly, is calling it 4g? The "media" ??

Also in reference to not having one and coveting their wonderous device. I simply refuse to pay the difference. I'll happily save my 360 dollars a year. If I want to get on the internet, I have one of 3 laptops or 2 desktops to do so

Hey, no problem! I'm one of the vast majority of iPhone users who couldn't care less what devices you choose to use. More power to you :)

A few links of the media skewing the iPhone as a 4G device. http://hubpages.com/hub/The-NEW-iPhone-4G-Coming-2010 [hubpages.com] http://www.gadgetsdna.com/10-reasons-not-to-buy-next-iphone-4g-hd/2757/

So the best articles to support your nomenclature are two articles from months before the iPhone was announced/released? And which claim Verizon has confirmed they're upgrading their network to support the iPhone. That's silly..

Re:The IPhone Cult!!

[mjwx]

Who exactly has claimed this?

Almost any Apple tragic. SuperKendall is one and constantly protests that he has no problems what so ever. I'm highly sceptical of such people, everything has flaws and nothing is perfect, even if the flaws are trivial and easily ignored or mitigated they still exist and refusing to acknowledge means you aren't capable of objectivity (ergo not trustworthy).

See also: Given Truth, the Misinformed Believe Lies More

This is exactly what's happening. Any electrical engineer could tell you that Apple's antenna problems stem from the holder changing the electrical length of the aerial which causes the phone to interpret the correct frequencies as incorrect frequencies. Most Iphone owners choose to believe that the problem does not exist or is a software issue rather then a fundamental design flaw. Apple owners are displaying cognitive dissonance when it comes to problems with Apple products, a design flaw goes against what they believe about Apple, thus the design flaw is a lie.

I think you're being confused by something -- the name of the phone is "iPhone 4"

Up until it's release it was being called the Iphone 4G by every rumour site, they said it would have WiMax and LTE, be faster the the Evo4G and be available on any US carrier. I think you are convieintly forgetting this point, see "cognitive dissonance" above.

Re:The IPhone Cult!!

[Moridineas]

Almost any Apple tragic. SuperKendall is one and constantly protests that he has no problems what so ever. I'm highly sceptical of such people, everything has flaws and nothing is perfect, even if the flaws are trivial and easily ignored or mitigated they still exist and refusing to acknowledge means you aren't capable of objectivity (ergo not trustworthy).

Ok, I still haven't seen any of this. If you'd like to actually link to anybody saying this I'd be glad to take a look, but so far despite my asking numerous people this question, nobody has provided me a citation.

This is exactly what's happening. Any electrical engineer could tell you that Apple's antenna problems stem from the holder changing the electrical length of the aerial which causes the phone to interpret the correct frequencies as incorrect frequencies. Most Iphone owners choose to believe that the problem does not exist or is a software issue rather then a fundamental design flaw. Apple owners are displaying cognitive dissonance when it comes to problems with Apple products, a design flaw goes against what they believe about Apple, thus the design flaw is a lie.

You talk a good talk, but in the lack of citations, it's just make believe, like the rumor sites you apparently believe in. I say again, I have yet to see anybody claim that the iPhone doesn't lose some signal strength when deathgripped without a case or even when held tightly in the antenna bridging bug area. Steve Jobs even highlighted the spot in his presentation last week! Show me these "most" iPhone4 users who refuse to believe this, or who think it's only a software problem. Apple has sold 3 million+ iPhones, so if "most" of them believe this, it should be a piece of cake for you to find this.

Up until it's release it was being called the Iphone 4G by every rumour site, they said it would have WiMax and LTE, be faster the the Evo4G and be available on any US carrier. I think you are convieintly forgetting this point, see "cognitive dissonance" above.

Wow, and here is where the insanity comes out! So by your standards, anything that appears on a rumor site is fact and impacts the actual product. A rumor is just a rumor! Why should a rumor have any importance at all beyond itself? The name of the phone is the iPhone 4, not the iPhone 4g. Apple has never once called it the iPhone 4g and Apple has never once claimed it has 4g capabilities. This is something that people made up. If you or others chose to believe certain rumors (of which there were multitude) before the iPhone4 was even announced, that's your fault for being gullible / uncritically accepting of wild rumors. Again, explain to my why rumor sites have ANY relevance here?

In this case it is PEBKAC

[Elfich47]

The issue is not the phone antenna and not the GPS antenna. The issue is when your hand (or a strip of metal for that matter) bridges between the two antennas. The effective length of the antenna is changed so the ability of the antenna to receive and transmit signals is significantly affected.

Re:In this case it is PEBKAC

[sznupi]

...when the device allows it easily simply by holding it in one of the most straightforward ways.

BTW, even some very prominent architectural structures happen to undergo debugging, sometimes / compilation is not quite final.

Nokia video

[Reverberant]

A Nokia E71 user posted this a month ago. And this is with a microcell nearby.

Get your own house in order before complaining about Apple airing your dirty laundry.

(FTR, I'm an E71 owner)

Re:Nokia video

[marcansoft]

I wouldn't trust the microcell signal. Femtocells (actual terminology) are a rather new technology and significantly cut down from a real cell tower (they are also based on new, cheap chipsets, not the good stuff). It's quite possible that an implementation bug in the cell (e.g. poor compensation for certain RF interference or signal degradation) is causing this.

Re:Video Proof

[tftp]

Bullshit. I am putting my hand on that spot and NOTHING HAPPENS.

Apple hopes that most of the iPhone 4 sucke^W users live and work in areas with great AT&T coverage. Sure, if you sit under the tower you will see no problem. Keep the phone. Then drive someplace with poorer coverage (easy to find on the AT&T network - I have an AT&T phone myself) and get zero bars. The phone is not returnable any more, so you are stuck. Unless, of course, you want to buy a redesigned iPhone 4.1, for full price, when Apple sells the entire manufacturing run of iPhone 4.0.

Re:Video Proof

[RedK]

Hand in your geek card. You have no grasp of the issue and it shows. Anand performed tests and the iPhone 4 loses 20 db of signal when lightly touched in the proper spot (lower left gap between antennas). 20 dbs might not result in a visible result on the bar display seeing how 5 bars is larger than that.

What has Slashdot become that we now have to deal with ignorant mass-consumers instead of just geeks with actual curiosity for researching and understanding ?

Blackberry case problems are different

[lullabud]

No, you don't need to use a case to make a call with a blackberry, but you do have to use a case if you want to conveniently prevent somebody from making a call from their pocket with one. Historically, Blackberries have had no auto-lock timer, but required being put into the case or hitting a key combination in order to lock the device. I've gotten countless pocket calls from my boss and other folks on my team at work, sometimes several in a row, sometimes during heated discussions that had sensitive company information as the topic. I'm not sure if it's still this way since my team entirely abandoned Blackberry, but if they haven't fixed the software then they have an outstanding problem of their own that could have significantly more potential damage.

People like me who hate phone cases are screwed either way.

Re:Blackberry case problems are different

[Anonymous Coward]

My 8700 which is at least 2 years old (I got it as a hand me down at work) has an auto lock feature on it. It also has an option to make any button act as an instant lock option which I set as well. So I'm not sure comparing blackberries that are older than 2 years to a current generation iPhone and making it out to be a similar problem is the greatest comparison I've ever heard...

Re:Blackberry case problems are different

[Anonymous Coward]

Blackberries have had auto-lock support since 2005 at least, just download the (free) AutoLock app. Or write your own app (it's very easy). Or use the built-in security lock feature (requires code to unlock though).

Re:Blackberry case problems are different

[Anonymous Coward]

Historically, Blackberries have had no auto-lock timer, but required being put into the case or hitting a key combination in order to lock the device.

Bull. Every blackberry I've seen for the last 7 years has that feature. You can even make it mandatory from the blackberry enterprise server.

You do have to read the instructions and turn it on though.

Re:Blackberry case problems are different

[Anonymous Coward]

thats why there is a lock button on the top left of every blackberry. Auto lock timer ? I don't want my phone to lock without me asking for it to lock.

Re:Blackberry case problems are different

[Anonymous Coward]

Historically, Blackberries have had no auto-lock timer, but required being put into the case or hitting a key combination in order to lock the device.

Maximum Security Timeout

(the above link is to the BES article, but the setting exists in standalone configuration too)

Or, there is the re-bindable convenience key

So you've been annoyed enough to rant on /. but not enough to spend 10 seconds on google?
Or are you just another iPhone fanboi?

Re:Blackberry case problems are different

[Anonymous Coward]

i just use the standby button on my pearl to solve this problem. not a big deal at all.

Re:Blackberry case problems are different

[Khyber]

"but you do have to use a case if you want to conveniently prevent somebody from making a call from their pocket with one."

What bullshit is this? My three year old 8100 Pearl has auto-lock.

Too lazy to RTFM?

Re:Blackberry case problems are different

[RocketRabbit]

He's not complaining that HIS blackberry is making these calls, he is just saying that a lot of people don't rebind their convenience keys, and if you read that article you linked to you will see that "The default value in the Default IT policy is a null value."

So it's careless IT admins who are at fault, along with RIM for defaulting to no lock time. Most users only change their ringtones and wallpaper, they do not drill down and make security adjustments.

Re:Blackberry case problems are different

[awyeah]

BTW, you can also hold the mute button (the one on the top of the phone) down for 2 seconds and it puts it in standby... the newer blackberrys have a dedicated lock button on the top of the phone.

The way to tackle this...

[Man On Pink Corner]

... and I'm sure that Nokia and the other manufacturers will agree, is to get the Oprah and Jenny Show out of the regulatory process. RF radiation does not cause brain cancer or anything else, and there is absolutely no reason to force consumer electronics manufacturers to design their antennas as if it does.

Where there is no demonstrable physical mechanism or repeatable empirical evidence for health effects, the burden of proof should rest firmly with the tinfoil-hat crowd. That's the only way we can move forward as a civilization, scientifically or otherwise. But instead, it's necessary for the wireless manufacturers to prove a negative. What Jobs should have said was, "Even though there is no physical mechanism or explanation for such a phenomenon, we have to assume our device will give you brain cancer if we don't use a really crappy antenna that's designed specifically to send most of the outgoing signal energy into the palm of your hand."

It's one of those elephants in the room that nobody seems to want to talk about. It would be great if a cellular carrier or handset manufacturer would take one for the team, and put the issue of faith-based RF exposure regulations on the table for discussion. We'd all get better phones as a result... and that's all we'd get.

Re:The way to tackle this...

[commodore64_love]

>>>most of the outgoing signal energy into the palm of your hand."

So now I'm going to get hand cancer, or possibly arthritis? Well that sucks. I'd rather have a stubby antenna sticking out the top of my phone.

Re:The way to tackle this...

[falconwolf]

Where there is no demonstrable physical mechanism or repeatable empirical evidence for health effects, the burden of proof should rest firmly with the tinfoil-hat crowd. That's the only way we can move forward as a civilization, scientifically or otherwise. But instead, it's necessary for the wireless manufacturers to prove a negative. What Jobs should have said was, "Even though there is no physical mechanism or explanation for such a phenomenon, we have to assume our device will give you brain cancer if we don't use a really crappy antenna that's designed specifically to send most of the outgoing signal energy into the palm of your hand."

Hello, reality calling. Nokia and RIM don't have Apple's problems, so what you're saying is that Apple has to meet regulations they do not have to meet. Can you back that up with facts? Or did you don your own tin-foil hat?

Falcon

Re:The way to tackle this...

[Man On Pink Corner]

Hello, reality calling. Nokia and RIM don't have Apple's problems, so what you're saying is that Apple has to meet regulations they do not have to meet. Can you back that up with facts? Or did you don your own tin-foil hat?

The "reality," as you like to put it, is that Nokia and RIM had the good judgment not to try what Apple did. Their phones are bigger and clunkier as a result. If Apple had succeeded, you can bet that the other manufacturers would be studying their patents for a partitioned external antenna, trying to figure out a way around them.

The other "reality," as you like to put it, is that users of all phones could get better coverage from fewer cell sites if the regulations permitted more flexibility in antenna design.

As Apple is learning, in consumer electronics you have to design for the worst case, and this particular worst case is much worse than it needs to be.

Re:The way to tackle this...

[falconwolf]

The "reality," as you like to put it, is that Nokia and RIM had the good judgment not to try what Apple did.

And the "tinfoil-hat crowd" is not responsible for that. Using a "tinfoil-hat crowd" is a straw-man argument trying to divert attention away from bad design decisions.

Falcon

Re:The way to tackle this...

[Man On Pink Corner]

And the "tinfoil-hat crowd" is not responsible for that. Using a "tinfoil-hat crowd" is a straw-man argument trying to divert attention away from bad design decisions.

Take your Adderall, then read, then post.

Quite stupid PR advice given to both

[vague disclaimer]

Q How do you draw attention to the comments of a competitor?

A: Rise to the bait.

Really, really dumb.

Re:Video Proof

[Moridineas]

The phone is not returnable any more, so you are stuck

That's not true... Jobs explicitly said that you can do a full return for 30 days after purchasing an iphone with no restocking fees, and get your at&t plan fees refunded as well.

Why did you think it's too late to return it? I don't think I'm missing anything? If you were the earliest iPhone adopter around, getting one on launch day, you'd still have another full week to decide if you want to return it or not...

Re:Video Proof

[LBArrettAnderson]

Look at the first comment in this thread ( http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1723044&cid=32938534 )

Re:Video Proof

[Moridineas]

Bullshit. I am putting my hand on that spot and NOTHING HAPPENS. Problem? No, I don't see it. Maybe some people do, but it's not severe. Certainly doesn't happen to most everyone or there would be TONS of these phones being returned.

But that's been the exact argument about the iPhone4 bug...it only really seems to affect people who both don't have a case and are in poor reception areas. Every iPhone user I know personally has a case, which I would presume would somewhat limit the problem. Many iPhone users (myself included) do also happen to be in poor reception areas unfortunately... The bug also seems to disproportionately affect left-handed people.

If you live in a GOOD reception area with the iPhone4, the death grip might make you not lose even a single bar, as has been demonstrated ad infinitum (go read the Anandtech review if it doesn't make sense).

Judging from Jobs' numbers if they're accurate, not too many people are returning the iPhone4 either.

Um, I went many years

[aussersterne]

with Nokia phones (6190, 6310, 8190) and they certainly did have some reception problems. The 6310i was a worldphone, but it had buggy radio code. If you lost a signal you might go the next hour without finding it again unless you powered off, then powered back on, and then you'd get a full signal in the same spot. The 8190 was very susceptible to interference from nearby hands or objects; put it in your shirt pocket and it was off network. In fact the best phone I ever owned signal-wise was an LG 4011 flip, a totally basic phone that could get a signal and hold a call anywhere, it seemed.

The iPhone 3GS and 4 are about average as phones (having owned both) but as data devices are the most useful technology items I've ever owned, with the iPhone 4 being an incremental, but still measurable, improvement over the 3GS and able to hold a call in places where the 3GS wasn't.

Re:Um, I went many years

[Aboroth]

Perhaps you missed this part:
"...most of which..."

Nokia has made many, many phone models, orders of magnitude more in number than Apple has. I believe his point was that Nokia has much more experience in antenna design than Apple so it isn't wise to completely discount their opinions, especially when their track record overall is pretty good.

Re:Um, I went many years

[cj_nologic]

Perhaps you missed this part: "...most of which..." Nokia has made many, many phone models, orders of magnitude more in number than Apple has. I believe his point was that Nokia has much more experience in antenna design than Apple so it isn't wise to completely discount their opinions, especially when their track record overall is pretty good.

Hence Nokia sueing apple for their "unlawful use of Nokia innovation": geek.com

It is the opinion of some people that Nokia legal action was the driver for Apple to invest in their own antenna designs - Apple are apparently convinced they will lose (can't remember where I read that) which implies they were actually just using Nokia designs until now. Of course Nokia have made a few mistakes along the way, but they - and others, like Ericsson, LG, Motorola, etc have much more experience in these areas, and know what works and what doesn't. And they don't put form before function.

Re:Video Proof

[Aboroth]

What you missed was the obvious implied passage of time in his story of an iPhone owner who keeps his phone past 30 days because he doesn't immediately see reception issues.

What a whiner

[Anonymous Coward]

What a whiner and complainer. He's using the press conference to put down his competitors, misrepresent his own company, and lying about the antenna problem.

Lying? He's claiming that all the phones behave the same way, but doesn't show any data. CR compared these phones under controlled conditions.

Re:What a whiner

[Phroggy]

Lying? He's claiming that all the phones behave the same way, but doesn't show any data.

He showed videos of precisely the same kind of signal loss that people have been complaining about, happening with three other phones, caused just by holding them in a particular way. He provided the best statistics AT&T would allow him to provide publicly, and acknowledged that the data does show the iPhone 4 drops calls more often than the iPhone 3GS. He also provided data about their return rate so far, and how many people have called Apple's tech support about this issue. What data are you looking for?

He's using the press conference to put down his competitors,

He went out of his way to say the competing phones demonstrated are great phones. He had absolutely nothing negative to say about any of them, other than that (as shown in the videos) holding a competing phone in a particular way, in certain areas, can cause a drop in signal strength.

Re:What a whiner

[Anonymous Coward]

He showed videos of precisely the same kind of signal loss that people have been complaining about

He showed videos of signal loss occurring with other phones, but he didn't show that it was "precisely the same kind of signal loss". And it is actually a different kind of signal loss. He actually implicitly admitted it, because on a normal phone, a bumper or case won't make any difference (the antenna is already under plastic).

He also provided data about their return rate so far,

He's quite good at giving people data and letting them draw the wrong conclusions, isn't he.

He went out of his way to say the competing phones demonstrated are great phones.

Look at the video again; he takes one subtle dig at his competitors after another and makes it sound like he is being nice.

Jobs is a great manipulator.

Re:What a whiner

[Anonymous Coward]

Data is not needed in the Reality Distortion Field.

Re:Video Proof

[tftp]

Why did you think it's too late to return it? I don't think I'm missing anything?

I should have been more explicit. Apple may hope to sufficiently muddy the waters and keep the users happy enough until the return period expires. People who live in large cities may not experience the low signal strength until, once in a blue moon, they go to a park - and then the death grip strikes. But by then it's too late to do anything, and in any case most of their phone use is in the city, so...

Myself, I live outside of the city, and the AT&T signal here is nearly zero. If I don't have the repeater turned on, the phone will ring but the voice connection can't be maintained. The repeater (Wi-Ex) helps with that. An iPhone would be completely useless to me; probably it won't even ring here. Besides, I only use flip phones (they are smaller) so none of current smartphones are of interest to me.

Re:Video Proof

[Moridineas]

Doesn't seem that way to me. The GP even says that on AT&T low coverage spots are easy to find! As an AT&T customer I totally agree with that.

30 days gives anybody time to try their new phone in a variety of situations. Plus given it's the most publicized phone in the world, nobody is going into this blind. The GP's obvious implication of a bait and switch is false.

Re:Video Proof

[Moridineas]

I totally agree re: crappy AT&T reception. I switched from Verizon to get the 3GS (and I would do it again too, FWIW) but I get crappy reception at my house now.

Even though I live in a low reception area, I wouldn't hesitate to get an iPhone 4. Well, I AM hesitating because my contract isn't up until next year. But in any case, a free bumper solves the death grip problem. I have my 3GS in a case and I think everybody else I know with an iPhone has a case too... if I got an iPhone 4 or iPhone 5--whatever is out next year--I'd get a case for it too. So, it really doesn't affect my decision.

IMHO this whole event is really notable as an example of mass Apple-hate! Apple-hate has always been around (and I should know, I loathed Macs in the pre-OSX days) but it seems like Apple is more hated than MSFT now! And of course Apple did handle the issue very poorly at first...

that's a different effect

[yyxx]

Yes, you can produce signal drop by holding phones in a certain way. Usually, that's not because you cover the antenna, it's because you get standing waves. That's particularly bad if you have a microcell sitting in your home. No phone can receive anything where there isn't a signal, and there are just places where there isn't a signal. At cell phone signal frequencies, moving 10-30 cm can get you from full signal strength to nothing. That has nothing to do with antenna issues. The iPhone antenna problem is a problem that exists on top of these normal effects and causes additional signal loss.

That's why all cell phone can experience signal loss depending on how you hold them, and why Apple can make those videos. But that's not a reasonable test. The CR test is what you need to do: you need to firmly fix the phone in space, and then just touch the case in different places. The iPhone signal strength drops, the signal strength on other phones remains essentially unaffected.

Re:that's a different effect

[Reverberant]

That's why all cell phone can experience signal loss depending on how you hold them, and why Apple can make those videos. But that's not a reasonable test. The CR test is what you need to do: you need to firmly fix the phone in space, and then just touch the case in different places. The iPhone signal strength drops, the signal strength on other phones remains essentially unaffected.

I can't see how the CR test is relevant, since I generally don't use the phone by touching it in different places* - I hold the phone in my hand, and when I hold my E71 a certain way in a low signal area, my call drops. I suspect this would be similar to holding an iPhone 4 and touching the bad spot. The end effect is the same: with either phone I have to hold it a certain way in low signal areas to prevent the call from dropping. Until that doesn't happen with a Nokia phone, they have nothing to crow about.

* or I use a headset to talk on the phone and don't hold it, but in that case this whole thing is moot.

Re:that's a different effect

[yyxx]

The end effect is the same: with either phone I have to hold it a certain way in low signal areas to prevent the call from dropping.

No, the end effect is not the same: the iPhone 4 has a 1% higher dropped call rate than a similar phone (3GS) with an internal antenna and worse radio (1% is a pretty big increase, and most of the usual dropped calls are from moving vehicles).

That's because in addition to the usual ways of losing signal, the iPhone 4 has a new one. CR shows you what it is.

Where's your hard data?

[augi01]

"RIM's co-CEOs say that Apple's claims 'appear to be deliberate attempts to distort the public's understanding of an antenna design issue and to deflect attention from Apple's difficult situation.'" No. Apple is attempting to correct the public's understanding of the antenna design issue. Did you watch the press conference? If you're going to make assertoric claims I hope you have the hard data to back them up.

Re:Where's your hard data?

[LBArrettAnderson]

"Did you watch the press conference?"

It looks like Mr. Jobs succeeded. The entire thing was full of misleading "facts." Look up at other discussions in this thread.

Re:Where's your hard data?

[Stan Vassilev]

It looks like Mr. Jobs succeeded. The entire thing was full of misleading "facts." Look up at other discussions in this thread.

To quote Wikipedia on "disinformation":

Unlike traditional propaganda and Big Lie techniques designed to engage emotional support, disinformation is designed to manipulate the audience at the rational level by either discrediting conflicting information or supporting false conclusions.

Jobs hit all the right notes on both disinformation, and traditional propaganda in the span of one short presentation.

Emotional support: [talking to the press] "we make so many great products, I thought you guys trust us"; "we maybe shouldn't take it personally, but we do, and it really hurts us"; "we have worked out asses off to satisfy every last customer"

At rational level he tweaked and made those antenna video demos (also see http://www.apple.com/antenna/. He used reframing techniques to make the problem appear common in the industry, blurring the differences between the iPhone specific antenna issues and general signal attenuation.

I don't believe a word Jobs says. He has a long history of using these techniques to sell and brand his company, it's how the "reality distortion field" joke came to be.

But you gotta admit: he's so good at it, even when it's apparent he's tweaking facts and inserting little lies here and there, it's hard not to be sympathetic to his side. Which may be largely why he succeeds, even if many won't take his presentations at face value.

Re:Where's your hard data?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but once you see through his deceptions and manipulations, the guy has about as much appeal as Stalin.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FuCRuXLzSw

Re:Where's your hard data?

[Stan Vassilev]

Yeah, but once you see through his deceptions and manipulations, the guy has about as much appeal as Stalin.

If trying to swing things in your interests by means of crafty presentation makes you a "Stalin", what's to be said of the media who spun the entire issue exactly as much, but in the opposite direction?

It's almost impossible to find an objective source of information these days. It's all well-tuned to someone's very specific interests.

Re:Video Proof

[Aboroth]

I'm sorry that you didn't get that from his story but I think it was obvious. Also most people are lazy. They just want their phone to work, and think of it more like an appliance than nerds do. If it works for them when they get it, and generally works where they normally go, checking the reception at every other possible point they could be with the phone generally isn't their primary concern. I bet a LOT of people will keep their iPhone 4 because they don't see any issues where they live, but someday they will be somewhere getting horrible reception because of the antenna problem. And yes, I anticipate that many of these people will discover this far past the 30 day return window.

User satisfaction, the only important thing.

[beamed]

User satisfaction is the only important thing to look at. iPhone 4 users are evidently not prepared to return their phone, even with the flaw (plus all the publicity) and even though the full price is reimbursed. Only a third as many returns as the 3GS.

Still, Apple will improve the quality of the 'phone' part of their iPhone, and maybe also give their whole iOS/Mac OS network stack a good working-over.

The result will be an even better phone, which is good for me. So I'm glad of all this negative publicity, even if it is overblown. Keeps Apple on its toes.

Re:User satisfaction, the only important thing.

[Anonymous Coward]

maybe you don't see the fallout from this reflected in returns, but how do we measure the lost sales? I know of two people who will not be buying the iphone 4 due to these issues, and I didn't go out of my way to find out about them. The general public does notice when Consumer Reports says "don't buy it". They notice when there are stories on the local and national news about "the problems with the iphone 4". I'm not sure if there is any way to know in the short term what the effects have been, but based solely on what I have observed (admittedly pretty random and unscientific) it is causing them to lose sales.

Re:User satisfaction, the only important thing.

[mjwx]

User satisfaction is the only important thing to look at. iPhone 4 users are evidently not prepared to return their phone, even with the flaw (plus all the publicity) and even though the full price is reimbursed.

Wife Satisfaction is the only important thing to look at. Battered wives are evidently not prepared to divorces their abusive husbands, even with regular beatings (plus all the offers of assistance) and even though full freedom will be reimbursed.

In your rush to shower Apple with praise you neglected an important point, many people are locked into Apple financially or psychologically. This presents itself as a massive barrier to just saying, screw it I'll return this piece of junk an buy something that works. Its the same kind of barrier that MS has used so successfully to keep business locked into the wonderful world of Windows. Considering that almost 4 out of every 5 Iphone 4's replaced an earlier model, vendor lock-in has played a huge part in sales (psychological lock-in, AKA Fanboyism is still lock-in).

Re:User satisfaction, the only important thing.

[beamed]

You greatly exaggerate the lock-in effect. Why can people switch from a Nokia or other brand to an iPhone but not the reverse? It makes no sense. And what you call 'psychological lock-in' is just plain old brand recognition.

The app-store *does* have a lock-in effect, but Apple just has done a great job of creating this new market. It is hard to hold that against them, unless you hate to see others succeed. And with these low prices, few will have really spent so much that lock-in is a serious factor. You can buy apps for other phones too.

Re:User satisfaction, the only important thing.

[mjwx]

You greatly exaggerate the lock-in effect.

Not really. It is as bad as people say.

And what you call 'psychological lock-in' is just plain old brand recognition.

No, for the most part it's cognitive dissonance. People refuse to allow themselves to believe they've been locked in and taken for a ride. You're a prime example.

Re:User satisfaction, the only important thing.

[beamed]

Haha, locked in, and I don't even own an iPhone... You're pathetic.

Apple-bashers have a certain psychological process going, it seems. Interesting, it is food for thought.

I'm thinking of getting an iPhone though, that's why, as I said earlier, I like this pressure on Apple to keep improving their stuff.

the interpretation is wrong

[yyxx]

The videos are "true" in the sense that they show two effects that lead to loss of signal and that both can be produced by gripping. They are false and misleading in that Apple implies that the causes and consequences are the same.

The wavelength of cell phone signals is around 4-10 inches. If you are in a location with standing waves, moving the phone a few inches or turning it a little can go from no signal to a strong signal (that's particularly likely indoors). Placing your hand around your phone (or moving your body) might also cause it if you do it in a particular way, not because it's shielding the phone, but because it's shifting the pattern a little. Every phone is susceptible to that and it has nothing to do with antenna design. That's probably the effect you're seeing in Apple's videos. It's not usually a problem in practice because you move around while using your phone, so the signal is completely gone only for brief periods.

The iPhone has an additional, unrelated problem with its antenna design: it gets detuned when you grip it a certain way. That is an unrelated source of signal loss and drop that behaves very differently. Unlike the standing waves, that drop is permanent and independent of where you move.

These two effects make it easy to create videos that seemingly show the same signal drop on a Nokia and on an iPhone, but they are different effects, and on the iPhone, both effects can occur simultaneously. Apple engineers aren't stupid, they know all this. Draw your own conclusions what that means about the truthfulness of Jobs' statements.

The Consumer Reports test was the correct one: fix the phones in a vice grip, then touch the case with a finger in different places. The iPhone shows strong signal loss, none of the others do.

Drop signal is *uncommon*

[aepervius]

I dunno where you all live, but even while biking in the countryside in europe I *never* had call dropped, never heard of people getting call dropped that much either, except for battery power drain. And seeing how some people cite a 1.4% drop rate, I would like to know if it is the europe drop rate, or the US one. My experience (albeit much much more limited than in europe) is that in comparison the US coverage simply sucks rapidely when you got out of cities, and sometimes even within cities (NY).

Re:Erm...

[omar.sahal]

One thing you get a lot on slashdot is user options in tools, Geeks love options and would rather have that over simplicity and clarity. I like them to understand that every one thinks differently than them and there is no market for only designing for Geeks.
If you argue about learning you're tools than you don't understand my point. Devices should be simple and intuitive, we can't learn to use every day items like phones toasters etc they should be intuitive. A question how would you live if you had to master every tools you touched.

• Get up in the morning turn off radio alarm clock (learn the exact procedure to do this)
• walk to door, (master exact procedure to turn handle)
• wash face and hands (master exact procedure to use powerfull feature laden tap)
• turn on radio (master exact procedure to use powerfull feature laden radio).

We haven't even had a shower and got out the front door. Secondly we need not trade powerful options for simplicity. Good design is about not losing powerful features while maintain simplicity.

Re:Video Proof

[grub]

My fiancé's ICrap4 drops calls all day long while at home

Well your imaginary fiancé with the imaginary iPhone 4 is in real luck; she can return it no questions asked to Apple.

Nokia is full of shit

[OrangeTide]

"we prioritize antenna performance over physical design if they are ever in conflict."

But you also pushed the industry towards internal antenna design. You did show the world that an internal antenna can be good enough for people to use, and additional optimizations make a modern antenna better than ones just 10 years ago. But really the internal antenna is a physical design choice that conflicts with antenna performance. Most of us like that choice, but still, inaccurate statements need to be called out.

Re:Nokia is full of shit

[Xgamer4]

This has come up a few times in this thread so far and, while it'd be technically right, I can't help but think it's missing the forest for the trees. Yes, in an ideal situation, an external antenna will be better than an internal one. But, as Apple has kindly demonstrated, it's far easier to mess with an external antenna.

Basically, while the maximum reception for an external antenna may be greater than the maximum reception for an internal antenna, the range of values for reception on the external antenna, combined with the ease of dragging the actual reception closer to the minimum number on that range for an external antenna, might make an internal antenna far more functional; especially if the difference in maximums isn't really that large.

Re:Nokia is full of shit

[OrangeTide]

the point, which i think you have missed. Is that while Apple has screwed up, it is pretty pitiful that their competitors are trying to pretend they never built a bad phone either. If they would have just kept their mouths shut we wouldn't be pointing at Nokia and laughing.

Nokia N900, what happened?

[dfries]

I've been concluding that the Nokia N900 has poor antenna performance. At least this is based on my brother and his wife sending blackberry text messages back and forth while in the same car while the N900 didn't even show a cell connection, and all three are T-Mobile. That and being at a friend's house who said some phones work, some don't there, they currently have cell phones that work, mine frequently said no cell tower there. So, I'm curious what any one else's experience with the N900 antenna performace is.

Re:Video Proof

[awyeah]

I recently switch from a BlackBerry Bold on AT&T to my 3GS, and the reception on the 3GS is noticeably worse, and it drops calls more. In the same places. Not many more, but enough for me to notice.

Re:Video Proof

[awyeah]

Your curve uses their 2G network - which is far more reliable (from my limited anecdotal evidence) than their 3G network. My Bold dropped a few more calls than my Curve... and my iPhone drops more calls than my Bold. Going backwards, I suppose.

I read in a comment on one of these threads that the cheapo flip phones are the most reliable, in terms of call drop percentage. Go figure.

Architectural debugging

[Elfich47]

I'm well aware that building plans need to be debugged :) It just takes an RFI, approval of the RFI, a Change Order, Approval of the Change Order and a Big Bucket of Money. Frank Gehry buildings made of aluminum and leak like a sieve come to mind.

Re:Architectural debugging

[sznupi]

I was thinking especially about that one NY skyscraper; sitting on columns which are not in its corners, but between them. This one could get quite messy fairly quickly, if not for debugging; far more than leaking roof. And it really seems to be, hm, an outright error in the compiler ;p

Re:Architectural debugging

[Jeremy Erwin]

I was thinking especially about that one NY skyscraper; sitting on columns which are not in its corners, but between them.

The Fifty-Nine Story Crisis

Re:Erm...

[fermion]

Bjarne Stroustrup is part of C++. C++ assumes that developers are not smart. That any person who should be coding can also handle manual memory management, and can decide situations in which things need to be encapsulated, and when the should not. That anyone who should code can plan the code out and know what kind of data they need.

People do not code in Java just because it is cross platform. It is because Java assumes that developers are morons, and allows them to code that way.

Apple assumed that anyone who should be developing comercial application were unlikely to be mono-linguist. That asking them to learn Objective C would not be a huge issue, and asking them to use a reliable MVC method would help the competent programmers.

MS simplified the development process and assumed that people were morons, and look at the success.

Apple assumes that requiring persons to use XCode is not an unreasonable for the iPhone. Google wants children to write applications to pad the Android App store.

One thing about Apple is there are skilled people writing applications that make my life easier, not just more automated. It is true that Apple treats users like morons, but that is the way it should be. Any competent developers know that one must idiot proof the machine or software. If one does not then the user will blame the designer. After all, asking a competent person to hold a phone a certain way is not unreasonable. It is only the idiots who can't learn basic skills that we need to protect against. What Stroustrup is saying is that bad things happen when you treat your developers like morons. I think Windows Vista and the Kin illustrates this.

Would Steve Jobs be abusive?

[Futurepower(R)]

Would Steve Jobs be abusive? Quote from Publishers Weekly: "Like other commentators, Deutschman portrays Jobs as both engaging and troubling, a natural charmer who is also an abusive, egomaniacal boss fond of meting out public humiliations."

Re:Video Proof

[Anonymous Coward]

This:

"What has Slashdot become that we now have to deal with ignorant mass-consumers instead of just geeks with actual curiosity for researching and understanding ?"

This proud Anonymous Coward agrees.

iPhone 4 Meets The GripOfDeathInator

[Reverberant]

From AntennaSys, Inc.:

1. Gripping the Naked iPhone 4 certainly had a strong negative effect on the data rates, both upload and download.
2. The effect of the grips on the iPhone 3G is much smaller. But, the Full-Grip still reduces the data rate on upload.
3. Use of the Apple "Bumpers" has a very positive effect on performance. It mitigates much of the effect of the grips at our signal strength level.
4. The iPhone 4 data rates still beat the iPhone 3G data rates under all grip conditions.
5. There was a large spread in the data during the Full-Grip, in both upload and download. This highlights the sensitivity of the antenna design to direct contact by the hand.

When they showed the other phones signal streangth

[future assassin]

Sorry I didn't watch the video yet but when the phones where loosing signals strength were all of them during a live phone call? If not then we have no way to know if they would have dropped a call right there and then vs the iPhone.

Nokia slamming Apple... pot meet kettle.

[SnowDog74]

Anyone remember the Nokia 8860? When Nokia was moving toward internal antenna design, this flagship model that originally cost $1000 was a sleek-looking slider. Actually it was a piece of crap. The rolling ball contacts on the slider routinely wore out their springs. This would disengage the mouthpiece/microphone. The slider piece was terrible. The "chrome" was a coat of paint over plastic. The antenna, they warned, shouldn't be covered with your hand. Why? Because it would drain the battery (due to no advanced kind of power management) and drop calls.

Within six months this phone, which did nothing special other than break, was reduced to $250 (still more than the iPhone). Within one year, it was discontinued. It was Nokia's "flagship" phone... and hey, at $1000 they were generous enough to throw in a "rapid charger"... how nice of them.

Re:Nokia slamming Apple... pot meet kettle.

[Anonymous Coward]

Given that that was 1999 and we are now in 2010, you would think that Apple would have learnt from others mistakes.

VPN for wifi

[Weezul]

iPhones support VPNs only because so many wifi configurations require a VPN.

Apple knows their target market backwards and forwards, that market excludes business men. A western business phone requires physical a keyboard, multitasking, universal generic cut & paste, clean SIP integration, tethering, exchange support, etc. You don't need any of that shit if your selling a combo phone and games platform like Google and Apple.

Yes, some people like yourself fit the iPhone into their business life, fine, you're a minority.

Btw, I'm very happy that my phone lets me keep multiple pdf viewer windows open simultaneously, but I'm still rather annoyed the phone doesn't support printing.

Re:VPN for wifi

[Moridineas]

Yes, some people like yourself fit the iPhone into their business life, fine, you're a minority.

Agreed, but I would say also, a very quickly growing number, while RIM seems to be declining. The next several years will be decisive.

Apple knows their target market backwards and forwards, that market excludes business men. A western business phone requires physical a keyboard, multitasking, universal generic cut & paste, clean SIP integration, tethering, exchange support, etc. You don't need any of that shit if your selling a combo phone and games platform like Google and Apple.

Other than the physical keyboard requirement which by definition removes the iPhone and many Android phones from the running, don't most Android versions and the iPhone support all of those features? SIP integration?

Re:VPN for wifi

[Weezul]

Afaik, iPhone's use an external SIP client with separate address book, not an internal client integrated into the normal dialer. Android same right?

Re:VPN for wifi

[Moridineas]

Yeah, I think you're right on that.

Though I'm not quite sure how the iPhone "Facetime" feature works. As I understand it, it's intended for video chat but it's effectively a voip client built into the core dialer/addressbook/etc.

Only works on wifi thanks to AT&T.

Re:VPN for wifi

[Weezul]

I bought an N900 almost entirely because skype and sip were properly integrated into the dialer, along with AIM, MSN, ICQ, etc. I wanted the whole open source phone for moral reason, but I needed some killer app before spending $500, well I knew I'd never really use latex or an sql client on my phone despite declaring those as requirements years ago.

I then however become extremely happy with the widgets, absolutely convinced me that Apple's menu oriented interface for the iPhone is suboptimal for power users.

In my case, a single glance at my primary desktop gives me the titles of recent unread emails, most recent sms or im, weather, and schedule, along with shortcuts for notes, contacts, sms/ims, and dialer. I'm sure I'd never even check the weather if I owned an iPhone, as I never checked the weather before, just got wet.

Another desktop houses facebook statuses, rss feeds, and useful tools, all that shit serves mostly to help prevent me checking slashdot, facebook, etc. And the two remaining desktops are frequent contact shortcuts, which double as online status for skype, msn, and aim.

Point being, there really is a difference between power users and consumers. There will always be people will fit any solid product into any given aspect of their lives, but good overall market targeting matters.

We'll see what phone introduces integrated print spooling first, definitely a critical feature for devices with tiny screens.

Re:VPN for wifi

[Moridineas]

I bought an N900 almost entirely because skype and sip were properly integrated into the dialer, along with AIM, MSN, ICQ, etc. I wanted the whole open source phone for moral reason, but I needed some killer app before spending $500, well I knew I'd never really use latex or an sql client on my phone despite declaring those as requirements years ago.

The N900 certainly seems popular among geeks (ie slashdot) but I can't say I've even seen one IRL. Skype btw does have access to the contact list, but is NOT integrated into the base phone dialer on the iPhone.

I then however become extremely happy with the widgets, absolutely convinced me that Apple's menu oriented interface for the iPhone is suboptimal for power users.

Possibly. I think you're right that widgets are useful, and I'll bet Apple adds them at some point. I also think it's worth noting that features that you personally find useful are not necessarily in the same subset of power user features. They may, but they may not be.

We'll see what phone introduces integrated print spooling first, definitely a critical feature for devices with tiny screens.

I guess. There are print apps for the iPhone. I'll bet Apple adds it soon thanks to the iPad. We'll see!

Re:VPN for wifi

[awyeah]

I'll agree with you on the physical keyboard issue - I don't know if it's 100% necessary, but it's way better for speedy and accurate typing (at least, for me it is).

But my iPhone supports multitasking (well, I can seamlessly switch between applications, even if it's not true multitasking). I'm not sure what you mean by "universal generic cut & paste," but I've been able to copy something from one place and paste it into another and it's always worked... there are lots of SIP applications, but they don't have it built-in. Tethering is available, but they sure took their damn time with it. And exchange support is excellent, in fact it works as well as any BlackBerry I've ever had (and I've had 4).

Also, I think I did see an application that can print things like PDFs to WiFi printers, I think it supports IPP and LPR.

The iPhone makes a decent business phone. Yeah, not as good as BlackBerry for the core functionality that BlackBerry has always done best, that's for damn sure. But it's pretty competent.

Re:VPN for wifi

[repetty]

> iPhones support VPNs only because so many wifi configurations require a VPN.

Could you please explain why this is bad? Just wondering.

Re:Video Proof

[MacGyver2210]

The human body has capacitance and resistance. When we touch a metal object, that object's capacitance and resistance is combined with our own. When that piece of metal is the HF antenna for an iPhone, this changes the tuning of the antenna. If you change the tuning of the antenna, the reception quality will drop dramatically. This doesn't require anything to be covered, just to make electrical contact with the metal.

This is pretty common sense for anyone who has built any type of electrical circuit before. I regard it as sad that Apple did not have the foresight to at least cover the exposed antenna portion in some type of epoxy or resin that would at least insulate it from touch. I suppose they were trying to charge for the insulation (bumpers) or make their phone "look cool" as is so often the case at Apple. That would certainly fit their "Screw that guy, we'll have 20 new fanboys tomorrow" business strategy.

Re:Video Proof

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually 5 bars represented between 50 and 100% signal strength or half of the available range which is only 3 dB genius... Learn how to talk the lingo if you are putting someone down.

Well, SILLY,

[aussersterne]

that's what some of us DO with our SMARTphones.

Nonstop heavy data use. The killer feature of the iPhone 4 for me is that it does everything the 3GS did without being any slower, but the battery now lasts me two days of heavy use. I make on the order of one call a week, if that. So if I call it a "data device" rather than a "cell phone" will that help you to understand?

Re:Well, SILLY,

[PopeRatzo]

So if I call it a "data device" rather than a "cell phone" will that help you to understand?

I think "Self-Image Enhancement System" would be most accurate.

Re:Well, SILLY,

[Golias]

Phone calls are nearly obsolete, as far as I'm concerned. I'd say about 75 percent of my voice minutes are occupied by my over-60 parents calling me about stuff. Everybody else in my life usually "talks" to me via texting, e-mail, social networks, etc. when we're not face-to-face.

So let me get this straight...

[aussersterne]

Apple sucks and the iPhone 4 is defective because people don't talk with their phones sitting on tables, they hold them in their hands, and they shouldn't be forced to do it with a case.

Meanwhile, other phones that drop signal when held in hands with no case don't suck, because the evil iPhone 4 from the evil Steve Jobs is the only one that does it... sitting on a table.

Is there any better example of the hypocritical, whatever-argument-is-worse-for-Apple-right-now Apple hate on this site?

Re:So let me get this straight...

[yyxx]

The iPhone 4 gets criticized because it drops more calls. It drops more calls because, in addition to the problems all phones have, it also has an exposed antenna.

Re:Video Proof

[Anonymous Coward]

What has Slashdot become that we now have to deal with ignorant mass-consumers instead of just geeks with actual curiosity for researching and understanding ?

Profitable.

Re:Video Proof

[Anonymous Coward]

20db... Wow. That's like losing the bottom 3.3 bits on your soundcard. Or like you were 26% further from the tower.

Not a problem at all, unless you're in the backyard of nowhere - or the operator is cr*p.

As for saying "hand in your geek card", then as much as mentioning the bars... I'd like to know how you got yours?

It may

[Sycraft-fu]

Apple sells cool and shiny well, but everyone else wants in on the action and Android is making that possible. Other cell makers are working hard to make shiny, high end, "you want a toy more than a phone" phones. That has serious potential to bite in to Apple's market (notice the bitching they've done about Android) and even more so if iPhone get a bad rep.

Do remember that the fashion industry, and that's what Apple is in, is extremely fickle. Currently, Apple sells a style that the hipsters love. It is cool to have an iPhone and a Mac. However that can change in a heartbeat. They can go from cool to uncool in a hurry, and then they are stuck trying to sell to business users and having to deal directly with RIM.

Except this isn't a scandal.

[falconwolf]

It is a relatively minor technical glitch.

It's more than just a "relatively minor technical glitch" and has been since Apple and Jobs stated there was no problem. Steve Jobs went so far as to tell one person who had trouble with his own iPhone "You are getting all worked up over a few days of rumors. Calm down. You are most likely in an area with very low signal strength". He tells the person to relax, it's just a phone, then says to get a life.

If Jobs and Apple had never said there was no problem and that it was just rumors, it would have stayed a technical glitch, but they didn't.

Falcon

Oh, and in case readers then I'm saying this because I'm an Apple basher I'm typing this on my MacBook Pro which I think is great. I got it after switching from Windows PC which I bought and used for almost 10 years.

Re:Video Proof

[markxz]

That's not true... Jobs explicitly said that you can do a full return for 30 days after purchasing an iphone with no restocking fees, and get your at&t plan fees refunded as well.

What do the upgraders do when they have traded in their old (usually older iphone) do until they can get a new phone (apart from get a Nokia)

tans

[falconwolf]

I hereby suggest that everybody who is caught using "gate" as a suffix is made to go outside on a sunny day, to be pommeled into the ground by the awesome force of photons, or to just get a tan ruining the geek cred of slashdot users forever.

And just to think, I'd like to be on the beach if not scuba diving under the water. Key Largo, I'm too far away.

Falcon

Re:Video Proof

[RedK]

Decibel Milivolts which are used in RF calculations (or just Decibels in general) are a logarithmic scale that doubles for every 3 points. I'll let you do the math on how much weaker your signal is after a 20 db drop (hint, it's not 26% weaker).

Apple's target market

[falconwolf]

Apple knows their target market backwards and forwards, that market excludes business men.

Except Apple is spending extensive efforts to court IT departments and establish corporate credibility.

Falcon

Re:Video Proof

[Moridineas]

Do you really have to trade in your old phone? I haven't done this with AT&T, but I don't recall ever having to trade in my old phone with Verizon when I was eligible for an upgrade...?

Blackberry vs iPhone

[falconwolf]

Anyway, here in North America, Blackberry's market share is still more than double that of the iPhone, so I doubt RIM is particularly "galled".

From Forbes: "iPhone Could Overtake BlackBerry Market Share in 2011". iPhone, BlackBerry slip as Android market share surges tells a different story. Personally I don't care who leads in marketshare as long as there is competition in a relatively free market.

Falcon

Take your Adderall, then read, then post.

[falconwolf]

Still wearing you tin-foil hat, are you?

You can't even be bothered to try to offer a counter argument. That or you don't have one.

Falcon

Re:Take your Adderall, then read, then post.

[Man On Pink Corner]

From http://www.antennasys.com/antennasys-blog/2010/6/24/apple-iphone-4-antennas.html

The FCC puts strict limits on the amount of energy from a handheld device that may be absorbed by the body. We call this Specific Absorbtion Rate, or SAR. In the olden days, when I walked ten miles to school in three feet of snow, uphill in both directions, cell phones had pull-up antennas. This allowed the designer to use a half-wave antenna variant, and put the point of maximum radiation somewhat away from the user's cranium. Of course, most people did not think it was necessary and kept the antenna stowed. Motorola's flip phone acutally had a second helical antenna that was switched into place when this was the case. But, more importantly, SAR rules were not yet in effect.

Flip phones became yesterday's style, and phones were becoming more monolithic. Some phones, like the early Treo, kept the antenna in the traditional location at the top of the phone, near one edge, but reduced it to a short stub. Whips became stubs, stubs became bumps, and finally antennas were embedded into the rectangular volume of the phone. The trouble was SAR; if you left the antenna at the top, the user was now pressing it into their head, insuring lots of tissue heating. Enter the bottom-located cellphone antenna.

Just about every cell phone in current production has the antenna located at the bottom. This insures that the radiating portion of the antenna is furthest from the head. Apple was not the first to locate the antenna on the bottom, and certainly won't be the last. The problem is that humans have their hands below their ears, so the most natural position for the hand is covering the antenna. This can't be a good design decision, can it? How can we be stuck with this conundrum? It's the FCC's fault.
You see, when the FCC tests are run, the head is required to be in the vicinity of the phone. But, the hand is not!! And the FCC's tests are not the only tests that must be passed by a candidate product. AT&T has their own requirements for devices put on their network, and antenna efficiency is one of them. I know because I have designed quad-band GSM antennas for the AT&T network. The AT&T test similarly does not require the hand to be on the phone.

So, naturally, the design evolved to meet requirements - and efficient transmission and reception while being held by a human hand are simply not design requirements!

Want phones to continue to get smaller and lighter? This goofy bullshit is what ultimately determines the limit. Don't want phones to continue to get smaller and lighter? Then why are you even reading this thread?

Re:Take your Adderall, then read, then post.

[makomk]

All that's still true of Nokia phones, and HTC phones, and every other modern mobile phone - yet it's only Apple that's screwed this up so spectacularly. (Which might have something to do with the fact that, while the FCC tests may not require phones to be tested with the hand in its usual position, most companies with any sense do it anyway.)

Re:Video Proof

[markxz]

These comments are from a uk perpective.

If the upgrade was on conract then a trade-in may be required.

Alternatively there are lots of tv adverts for cash for mobile services and the ugrader may have aleady sold their old phone.

Steve Jobs lying? Say it ain't so!

[Orion Blastar]

Steve Jobs lying? It can't be!

That's unpossible! Steve Jobs always tells the truth even when he lies, that is what the reality distortion field is for.

But what is Steve Jobs missing? He does not even look very healthy anymore, but John Lithgow has some advice for him, He's got to have pep! Just wear orange prison colored baggy pants, suspenders borrowed from Larry King, and a wacky Hawaiian shirt with blue and white flowers on it. Plus a mini me and some kids and dancing lessons. Don't forget to look angry while doing all this so you let you know your agent you are upset this was the only job he/she could get you and they fired Barny because even he wanted too much.

Re:Video Proof

[Tablizer]

I am putting my hand on that spot and NOTHING HAPPENS

I don't want to hear about your dating life, we've all been through that already. Now, about your phone...
 

Mmmm hmmm.

[solios]

Apple's been cutting corners on hardware since the beginning - on the desktop side, they've always made up for it in software. Here, not so much. This isn't a new thing - you're having the same experience that Power Mac, Newton, Apple III and Performa owners the world over have had... the difference is that since it's happening to YOU it's NEW and SPECIAL and MUST BE FIXED NOW DAMMIT!!!

Yeah, get in line. Behind the Apple III owners, the eMate owners, anyone who's ever heard of a Pippen, and the rest of us who were sick of using Apple hardware BEFORE it was "cool."

I own an iPhone. It works, the battery life is a joke, and the keyboard is Fawlty Towers incarnated as software.

But it's COOL, dammit!

About Nokia

[anebg]

No wonder their devices look like shit. But yes, they do make perfect calling devices.

Fallacious fallacies

[copponex]

Just fwiw, you've just made as your argument one of the most classical and basic fallacies -- an appeal to authority.

Since not all arguments from expert opinion are fallacious, some authorities on logic have taken to labelling this fallacy as "appeal to inappropriate or irrelevant or questionable authority", rather than the traditional name "appeal to authority". For the same reason, I use the name "appeal to misleading authority" to distinguish fallacious from non-fallacious arguments from authority.

http://www.fallacyfiles.org/authorit.html

Just because you appeal to an authority doesn't make it a fallacy.

Re:Fallacious fallacies

[drinkypoo]

Just because you appeal to an authority doesn't make it a fallacy.

The argument that someone has done something more necessarily means they are better at it is a logical fallacy, and the fallacy is appeal to authority. They are an authority because they do it a lot, right? By that logic McDonalds should build a better burger. Saying that RIM and Nokia are better at making phones because they've done it more times is false. You can hire experience.

Re:Fallacious fallacies

[Moridineas]

So you don't think when the poster said:

They don't need to give more of a response because while Apple has created a few phones Nokia and RIM have created hundreds of different models from the stupid to the very cutting edge smart phone. ... It isn't worth dignifying with a response.

That that is a fallacious argument?

Saying (paraphrased) "Nokia and RIM are such great authorities in the field that they shouldn't even dignify any potential criticism with a response" is pretty much a textbook example! Do you disagree?

Re:Fallacious fallacies

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually that's a misunderstanding of the fallacy - appealing to authority as the sole point of an argument is always a fallacy as there are many reasons that the single authority can't be trusted (either as malice or ignorance), as they are still human and therefore fallible.

+ points for irony though - considering you cited only one source without providing any reason it should be considered as a valid authority on definition of fallacies :)

Re:So the videos are true? Please Watch Th

[olafva]

Very well said. It's disgusting to see so many /. posts with no basis in fact, just personal bias.
Before someone posts - please inform yourself by watching the video.
Apple has done far more than any other smartphone company ( including the "foreign" ones, like
RIM and Nokia) to make sure everyone who buys an iPhone4 is 100% satisfied including
free bumpers and complete refunds (no restocking fees). Funny how despite all the press
about this very minor issue, the iPhone 4 is Apple's best product yet with virtually no
returns and the highest rate of customer satisfaction among all smartphones.

I stand corrected

[lullabud]

I stand corrected, and as an IT admin I feel like an ass for not really researching it properly. I guess if it had been a mission critical feature rather than an irritation I'd have taken more time to really look into it, but at least now I know the details.

It's true though what the other reply here said about other people not setting the value. I shouldn't have to install an enterprise service that has a prerequisite cost in order to automatically get an auto-timeout to be default. I've never worked with BES because the companies I work for have never paid for it, had a big enough investment in BB to get it for free, or made it a big enough priority to give me time to install it.

I think that a simple feature like this shouldn't be buried in a place that every blackberry I've ever gotten back did not have this feature enabled because it was probably not found.
I think it should be enabled by default, even if it has a long timeout.
I think it should not require a password as a prerequisite feature enablement in order to get this functionality.
I think it should have a less vague name than "security timeout", perhaps one that makes it obvious that the keyboard will lock.

Also, because of circular "back" loops I usually bind the convenience key to the home screen as a quick way out, otherwise that would be a great lock method which would be much more obvious than the default.

And yeah, I'm annoyed enough to rant on /. without Googling. Isn't that what this place is for? Even the editors do it.

Steve Jobs to iPhone 4 customers:

[Anonymous Coward]

"You're all damned liars and here's your damned free bumper you've been whining about bitches!"

Re:Video Proof

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't say 26% weaker, I said 26% further away. Power decreases as r^2. Try to do the math. I did.

Re:So the videos are true? Please Watch Th

[fostware]

Before someone posts - please inform yourself by watching the video.

I did. And noticed the death grip required on a competitors phone, to produce anything *close* to what lightly touching an iPhone 4 does.

Apple has done far more than any other smartphone company ( including the "foreign" ones, like RIM and Nokia) to make sure everyone who buys an iPhone4 is 100% satisfied including free bumpers and complete refunds (no restocking fees).

Funny. I'd put that down to the two class actions in the first fortnight of sale.

Funny how despite all the press about this very minor issue, the iPhone 4 is Apple's best product yet with virtually no returns and the highest rate of customer satisfaction among all smartphones.

There are quite a few anecdotal stories about Apple Store staff pulling shifty "you can't get a refund or any further exchanges" lines regarding support. I would guess that would skew the return rates somewhat.

Also, one point that irks me quite a bit, is the classification of an iPhone as a "smartphone". While technically correct, most users have an iPhone for internet, apps, and (because it's one less thing to carry) a phone. Completely separate from a smart phone for tying email, sms, and voice conversations together with notes and other integration features. If 15-year old "Candy" has a high level of satisfaction with her iPhone, it will usually because her expectations of "smartphones" would be a lot less that those using it as an actual smartphone.

I like the ease of use with iPhones and their apps, I appreciate the Exchange mobile sync (without requiring BES licenses), and I like the push to a greater screen area.
I don't like the way they've told their users it's an end-user problem (then provided a fix only when faced with a lawsuit), and been so smug about the whole thing.

Re:Video Proof

[pablo_max]

The loss of 20dB is actually a lot! The decibel (dB) is a logarithmic unit of measurement that expresses the magnitude of a physical quantity. (wiki quote, not mine)
Keep in mind that most phones have a TIS (Total isotropic sensitivity) of between -102.5 to -110dBm depending on the band.
I can assure you that with a TIS of -82 to-90dBm, no network carrier in the world would allow that phone on their network for dropped call issues.

Tests have shown that both the UL and DL speeds drop to a crawl, so presumably the phone's TRP (Total radiated Power) would also drop quite a bit. Certainly not 20dB though since that would be really a lot in terms of power output.

It's simply hitting where it hurts, saying truth

[Kartu]

It's simply hitting where it hurts, while saying truth. The "digitally clueless beauty queen" insult perfectly describes current iPhone4 problems.
While you could affect ANY antenna on any phone by covering it, Apple's device is the first one, that could be affected by touching, not covering. I guess it's the first phone, who's creators didn't bother isolating antenna.

Form follows function

[Runaway1956]

"Jobs wanted it that way. The man has form!"

Putting aesthetics ahead of function is just stupid, no matter how rich, famous, or influential a man might be.

From TFA:
In general, antenna performance of a mobile device/phone may be affected with a tight grip, depending on how the device is held. That's why Nokia designs our phones to ensure acceptable performance in all real life cases, for example when the phone is held in either hand. Nokia has invested thousands of man hours in studying how people hold their phones and allows for this in designs, for example by having antennas both at the top and bottom of the phone and by careful selection of materials and their use in the mechanical design.

No it isn't

[SmallFurryCreature]

What you call an accounting trick is normal business practice. You can pre-order every phone you want. Just nobody wants to. THAT says something.

What next, box-office results ain't real because you can only watch the movie when it plays?

hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

i dont see any nokia phones losing signal at apples site? wtf? :D

Re:Video Proof

[Anonymous Coward]

No, you fucking-ass moron, you did not do the math. You may have done something that felt like math to you, inasmuch as it stressed your tiny little brain, but it wasn't any math pertaining to this problem.

26% farther is -2dB

-20 dB is 10x the distance

STFU&DIAF

Re:Erm...

[loufoque]

C++ assumes that developers are not smart. That any person who should be coding can also handle manual memory management

Memory management *should* be done automatically in C++, as this is the only practical way to enforce exception-safety throughout, and it also makes programs easier to reason about.
It's simply done with RAII rather than garbage collection. It still requires the coder to think of resource ownership as part of the design.

Re:Video Proof

[AaronLawrence]

Nope. 50dBm, not 50%. Vastly different things.

Re:Video Proof

[Anonymous Coward]

RedK, this entire comment thread started out with blithering ignorance and descended from there. I agree with you, but this stunning from in IQ related to posted to /. is not a recent experience. Just look at this page; few here can either read nor do basic arithmetic. ;)

Re:Video Proof

[Anonymous Coward]

yes ... because you use the way Steve wants you to use it : pull it out of your pocket ever once in a while when some hot guys are around and then carefully put it back in. My fiancé's ICrap4 drops calls all day long while at home and mine doesn't ... I have an old arse Curve and we are both on ATT ...

Fixed that for you... this is Apple we're talking about.

Yes, but it's an old machine

[Kupfernigk]

A lot of the comments here about "other phones" are referring to old models - and in the smartphone world, that's anything over a couple of years old. One would have expected manufacturers to have ironed out all the bugs by now, because the technology has matured. There are basically three sorts of smartphone: no keyboard, fixed keyboard and slider keyboard. They have all been around for years. Apple designs only one kind of phone, so their R&D team have only one base design to worry about. HTC, Samsung, Nokia and so on design far too many kinds of phone (scattergunning the market really is not clever). Because of this, Apple cannot afford to screw up at all on a new model; the supplier can't offer an alternative as a replacement. This whole episode is really more about the pros and cons of different approaches to the market. (Incidentally, I'm largely agreeing with you, but suggesting a reason why it happens.)

scale of the problem

[Gary W. Longsine]

1 more dropped call per 100 calls.

Let's say you had no phone service one day out of 100. Would that be acceptable to you?

Well, that's not what happens. Most people who experience a dropped call don't throw up their hands and yell to the sky, "Yaweh! Why has thou forsaken me? Your sign of the dropped call has been received! I shall obey, and attempt no further phone access for the remainder of the day!"

Rather, they re-dial the call, get service and move one. (With the footnote that dropped calls happen more often when one's in a zone of weak signal, and the subsequent calls in those areas are more likely to drop, as well.)

Re:scale of the problem

[PopeRatzo]

Most people who experience a dropped call don't throw up their hands and yell to the sky, "Yaweh! Why has thou forsaken me? Your sign of the dropped call has been received! I shall obey, and attempt no further phone access for the remainder of the day!"

You must not use your mobile phone for business.

I've seen people lose a call and crush their phone on the ground in a hail of epithets. Most recently, it was a trader (orange jacket and all) outside of the Mercantile Exchange building. Admittedly, he was probably hopped up on crystal meth at the time, but still he fuckin' snapped from a lost call. I was walking my bike across west Wacker Drive at the time near the Opera House and witnessed the scene with my own eyes. It was not the first time I've seen someone destroy a phone out of fury over a bad connection.

Of course, it may be different with iPhone users. Maybe they respond with "Thank you, sir, may I have another?" when a call is lost.

why, oh why

[Gary W. Longsine]

Well, for most of the past three years, I've been using iPhones quite a bit (months at a time) in two areas where AT&T has "shitty" service. One of those was in downtown Washington D.C., where the dropped call rates in certain locations are maddening, yet 50 feet away, service is fine (a common cell phone problem on all networks in concrete jungles). However, I noticed a curious thing. Over the past three years, a number of folk previously using Blackberry on Verizon became so dissatisfied with the performance of the Verizon 3G network in D.C. that they... wait for it... switched to iPhone, and love it. This surprised me. The first time I noticed this had been a person who was openly mocking iPhone during the first year of iPhone. She bought a 3GS last year and wonders why she waited so long.

Re:Video Proof

[Anonymous Coward]

Ooop. Typo. Thanks for correcting me.

That'll teach me to double check the arithmetic when I do this stuff after getting home on Saturday night :-))

Re:Antenna engineer

[DCFusor]

While parent correctly points out that new and better electronics can and do reduce the need for antenna efficiency, I'm not aware that the internal antennas are (or can be) as good as an external, for a couple of reasons. One is the no one ever held a phone by the external antenna, and very close (much less than a wavelength) proximity to human flesh -- a great absorber of radio waves, never helps. A properly tuned/loaded external antenna will always kick out better performance than a little thing on the PCB inside the case where it will often have more close proximity to the hand. They are getting good, sure -- for a isotropic radiator, but don't match a for real full length quarter wave or dipole or 5/8 wave antenna either. There's just no beating a larger sized exposure to the wave-field for raw performance. That's why there's a dish involved in a satellite dish, for example -- you can't just point the little feed antenna and lna at the sky and have it work. If you don't believe me, just go to someplace like www.digikey.com and put antenna into the search, and then look at the performance of chip antennas (.5dbi) vs other types -- see for yourself. Apple was evidently attempting to get a bigger, better performing antenna (as well as skip some license fees) by making it discrete and outside the phone -- just that one little detail of proximity to the human absorber that they somehow missed utterly. Weird, because as someone who has designed and built and tested tons of antennas -- anyone who does this will know right off that you see the signal strength drop wildly when you just reach in close to try adjusting it. You have to do the adjustment, and then get back away before the reading means diddly. If you tune it to work when you're close in, it will be wrong when you aren't. And because human flesh is "lossy" it's never as good with you close as it is with you farther, no matter the tuning/loading.

Dude looks like a lady.

[DangerJones]

She? Fiancé is male.

Fiancée would be the female.

en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fiancé
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fiancée

Try Again

[SuperKendall]

Phone Usage: BlackBerry. If we are in (say) a parking garage, we use my phone. The iPhone craps out much earlier (and we use the same carrier).

If signal strength concerns you you really need to try an iPhone 4 in the same area. I get signal now in areas I couldn't with a 3Gs, much less a 3G. SImply put the external antenna design is better at pulling in signal than a lot of phones, and at this point it may even best your Blackberry.

Nokia rules

[Anonymous Coward]

I had the Zippo - nuff said

Re:Video Proof

[Moridineas]

I could be wrong, but I don't think any US providers require you to turn in your old phone.

And if you did choose to sell your old phone...how is Apple/the cell company to blame for that?