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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.'"
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.
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.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
As long as no one is arguing over numbers and talking about anecdotes and "priorities" or whatever, this should be maximally annoying...
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.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
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?!
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.
The Official Site of 1337 Pwnage
I should think that the GPS antenna design isn't really responsible for dropped calls, though...
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.
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.
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.
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%!"
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
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.
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."
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!
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.
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
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.
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%.
"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
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 ?
"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
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.
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.
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.
Architectural plans are like computer source code with a couple of differences: You only compile once.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
Trolling is a art,
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.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
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.
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
Should there be a Law?
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.
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.
You are welcome on my lawn.